Ink

by Hal Duncan

  The Dead Flesh

  Pasha had a plan, the beggar begins. His English is broken but it's good enough to tell how he served in the Turkish Ninth Corps under Enver Pasha, how Pasha wanted the ink fields of Baku as his prize, and more. Yes, Captain Englishman, he had a plan. So they marched over the Allah Akbar mountains in December 1914, to draw the Russians away from Kars and Ardahan, ambush them at Sarikamish. Halfway between Kars and Erzurum, they met, ninety-five thousand Turks and sixty-five thousand Russians. It nearly worked—the Russians started retreating— but the weather… The Russians are cold men inside, he explains, and the Turks do not like the cold. Five days of fighting and five nights of freezing in the deep snow of the mountain heights, he tells Carter. Soldiers getting lost at night. They tried to light fires. Many of those who fell asleep never woke up again. Thirty thousand men lost in the battles, more in the biting cold, and by the time they reached Erzurum two weeks later, defeated, four-fifths of them were gone…

  “And this hand is then the claw you see now, Captain Englishman. What is your word? Frostbite, yes, frostbite.”

  He snaps his teeth with an audible clack.

  “Bit off my fingers and leave me with… this.”

  Enver Pasha blamed it all on the Christian Armenians, of course.

  And then—ah yes—he tells Carter of Suez in February of 1915. Another great plan, to strike with a surprise attack—it will he easy, they say—to cut the very jugular of the British in the East, the Suez Canal, push through and raise a revolt in Islamic Egypt.

  “Hah! They are blind like I am blind now, here … this eye. British bayonet steal it, would have steal my life if I not kill its soldier first.”

  Was the Captain Englishman at Gallipoli? he asks Carter. Does he know the smell of corpses left rotting on the battlefield?

  Carter wasn't at Gallipoli, but he knows that smell only too well.

  The beggar picks up his withered, stunted right arm with his claw, pulls it up to his forehead in a travesty of a salute. Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Kemal Bey, he explains, great Atatürk himself, was in command there. A man of will.

  “Every soldier who fight here with me,” says the beggar in a bitter mockery of military bluster, “he know that honor ties him. No retreat. Not one step. And you want rest? No! There no rest for our nation, not forever. No rest until we throw the enemy into the sea.”

  He lets his arm go and it drops, a dead weight.

  “Plans and speeches, Captain Englishman. Very important in a war.”

  It was May, he tells Carter. Each side had dug in and, after all the attacks and counterattacks, a stalemate had held for a month or so. The Australians cramped in their little line of trenches, the Turks knowing that sooner or later they would have to strike. Then the reinforcements started to come forward—boys, he says, no combat. They see my eye patch, my hand, and they piss in their boots. But quietly, secretly, he tells Carter, they fill the trenches till the British spotter planes can hardly miss it.

  “I tell them it will be a massacre. But they are deaf. Like me, Captain Englishman, in this ear. One of your grenades when we go over the top. Shrapnel slice it off. They dig shrapnel out of my head.”

  He laughs. The doctor had told him he was lucky to have survived.

  “Do you not think I am so very lucky, Captain Englishman?”

  He closes his eye and leans forward, the elbow of his good left arm propped on his thigh. Outside the airfield terminal, it's gone quieter, the crowd thinned out so that Carter now has room to sit down on the dusty step beside the beggar. He notes the stares of passersby, looks of disgust and shame and blank dispassion. The old soldier stares straight forward with his eye closed. Chin up as he looks at nothing, thinks Carter.

  “Where did you lose the leg?” says Carter. “And the arm?”

  “Leg first,” says the old man.

  He had lost his leg to cold steel also, he tells Carter. It was October 1917, and the British were about to attack Gaza again. The Turks knew this because Al-lenby's artillery had been bombarding the garrison there for four days, five days, six. Two or three divisions had been deployed. More on their way, so the rumors said. Bristols flying overhead looking for weak spots in the Turkish line. Oh, yes, it was clear that a full frontal attack was coming soon.

  So he had felt safe in Beersheba—little, unimportant Beersheba out in the desert—until the cavalry came charging from all directions.

  He still remembers the sight of the Australians’ horses in the evening, charging through the smoke and dust of a battle that had raged all day. How he stood in wonder as the cavalry rode down on them, breached their defenses. Horses weak with thirst, dying of thirst, Captain Englishman. But so beautiful. How he stood looking down a line of sandbags and soldiers, seeing these beasts leaping here, and here, and here, and here, over the Turkish lines, a wave washing over them. So beautiful.

  And he tells Carter how it is a terrible thing, Captain Englishman, a terrible thing, to hear a horse scream as you shoot it in its belly, as it leaps so beautiful over your head.

  “To destroy,” he says, “such creatures …”

  He talks of a cavalryman whose horse he brought down, how he ran at the Turk, with tears in his eyes and the rifle of a dead man in his hands, how he still staggered on with two bullets in his chest. The third shot had finally dropped the cavalryman, but not before his bayonet took a slice out of the old Turk's calf.

  “It was not deep, Captain Englishman. It would have heal very quick, but” [he shakes his head] “not in the desert.”

  The Turks had been routed from Beersheba, without time even to poison the wells, and he had hobbled into the desert with his squad, leaning on this comrade's shoulder or that one's, half carried at times by young men who knew he'd been at Sarikamish and Gallipoli, men to whom he was the Old Man, a mascot of sorts. They'd thought he was mad to lead them out into the waste; but the Old Man knew the desert, oh yes, knew much about the desert, so they trusted him.

  By the time they reached Tel-el-Sheria, the gangrene had already set in.

  “Do you know how I wake after they cut my leg off, Captain Englishman? I wake in the ruins of a hospital, dead men all around me. I wake into morphine dreams, Captain Englishman.”

  Having broken the line at Beersheba, the English were pressing their advantage, pressing for Jerusalem by Christmas, and on to Damascus. The doctor's saw had barely finished its work, the last stitch only just in place, when the first shells brought the roof of the hospital down.

  “I am not sure what is real about that time, Captain Englishman, what I saw and what I only thought I saw.”

  He talks of being woken by the pain, crawling through the ruins, the shells still falling around him. Somehow he had found more morphine, and somehow in the morphine he had found the strength to keep going, even as the walls fell around him. More shells, and then grenades and gunfire. Soldiers screaming. I saw a man made of fire, Captain Englishman, a djinn. Skeleton horses ridden by angels. Blasts of blue-green fire like orchid blossoms, too symmetrical, too sculpted to be real. Dust devils, black as night, rising out of the wounds of fallen soldiers. He saw sights so strange in his delirium that he hadn't noticed the shrapnel in his right arm till he was lying in the desert sands outside the town, hidden between a dead horse and a rock.

  “My mother, she is of the desert,” he says. “Not Turk, but not Arab, no. My mother, she teach me many things about the desert, things even the Bedu do not know Many salts in the sands here. Bury a thing in the sand here, Captain, and it keep forever.”

  There's a sly look to his face as he taps the scar up near the shoulder of his withered arm, where the nerves must have been severed.

  “Dead things keep forever in salt, Captain Englishman.”

  Carter feels a shiver run down his back. That hawklike eye somehow doesn't seem as human now; there's a different challenge in the way it fixes him with its gaze, no longer demanding that he see the man beneath the mutilation, but that he see some d
eeper truth beneath the man, a truth that is perhaps not quite sane.

  Carter stands up. Where is that bloody boy?

  “I have not finish my story, Captain Englishman. I have not finish. Stay. Let me finish my story.”

  And now he tells Carter of the last days of his war: of being found, this maimed thing, mad on morphine, by the retreating Eighth Army as they fell back under the British advance; and of the fall of Gaza and Jerusalem under siege. It was November 1917, and Lawrence was dead in Deraa, a symbol for Faisal to rally the failing Arab Revolt around. It was November 1917, and Kemal Ataturk was in Istanbul, relieved of command by Pasha, brooding, gathering his Nationalist uprising against Germany's lackey Sultan. And then Ataturk and his men had seized the Sultan YavuzSelim and theMiddili, the German gunships sitting in the Sea of Marmara ready to defend Istanbul… or to level it if need be. And Ataturk was dead in the mutiny, and the Nationalists had a martyr.

  The coup had plunged the Turkish forces in Palestine into chaos, trying to act on conflicting orders or no orders at all. By early December Damascus was under siege, supply lines cut off, the city starving. And so, on the very day the Turks agreed to their armistice, leaving Germany to fight its own battles, this half-ruined wreck of a man had been caught stealing food from the storeroom of the military hospital where he was recuperating, and the final insult had been perpetrated on what remained of him.

  The old man's eye pins Carter to the step.

  “Was it mercy, do you think, Captain Englishman? Blind law? I steal with my left hand—how do you say? I pinch, yes, pinch. But they take my right hand. Useless right hand! Dead! Dry like fig! Tradition, Captain Englishman, tradition. Do you like my story, Captain Englishman?”

  Carter says nothing.

  “Ah,” says the old man, “I give you better than words. I show you, Captain Englishman. I show you what happen to me. I show you my story.”

  He waves his left arm round as if to take in the steps and the terminal behind them, the crowd going in and out. But it's his ragged bundles he's gesturing at, Carter realizes.

  “You see,” says the beggar [he begins unwrapping one of the smaller bundles of rags] “I save my fingers from Sarikamish. Look. See.” Carter feels the bile rise in his throat. “And I crawl in the sand in Suez. Do I hear the shells and bullets? No.”

  He tugs at the corner of another bundle but Carter is still staring at the contents of the first. It's not possible. For the love of God, it's not possible.

  “So I crawl in the sand. I find what is left of my ear,” says the old Turk.

  He grins, still chuckling to himself as he peels the second bundle open. The dead flesh of the fingers and… what's little more than a lump of gristle now sit on their filthy rags like some exotic roots he's offering for sale, fruits dried black in the sun. Carter looks at the madman but there's nothing he can say as the man hauls the largest of the bundles thumping down the steps and around in front of him, peels it open.

  “I carry my own leg with me through the desert while the morphine shows me angels and devils. Dig it out of the debris. You understand, Captain Englishman? You understand why I do this? Is mine. Belongs to me.”

  “For God's sake, man—”

  “And I keep my hand too. They take it for stealing, but is mine.”

  He picks the last of the bundles open, like a child opening a handkerchief that wraps an apple for their teacher.

  “I have names for them all, you know,” the old man says. “My—how do you say this?—spoils of war. My treasures.”

  His voice is rising, mad now, clearly mad, as Carter backs away.

  “I call these fingers Armenia. I call this scrap of ezr Sinai. I call this legPalestine, and this dead arm, ah yes, Captain Englishman, I call this the Holy City of Jerusalem.”

  Down a step. Another. Carter turns. Anywhere. Away, just away. The voice calls after him.

  “What do you think of that, Captain Englishman? And this severed hand, dried in the desert dust, dead before it was even lost, what shall I call this, Captain Englishman? Shall I call it Syria?”

  STICKS AND STONES

  When at last I found the boy, writes Carter, the most curious thing is that I found him being taunted by a group of five or six young Arab children, girls and boys, all smaller than him, all terribly brave in their numbers, and all utterly vicious in their hatred. You would have thought he was Lucifer himself, the way they hurled abuse at him, called him shaitan … enemy … devil. One vile little thug had a stone in his hand ready to throw, and would have done, I'm quite sure, had I not been there to take it from him and send him packing with a clip round the ear. Needless to say, they all took flight with the cowardice of any bully, but I felt quite sorry for my poor native guide; he was in such a sorry state, spittle on his face and more than a few scratches on his hands where he ‘d been fending off their sticks.

  But that's not the curious thing, Anna.

  “Are you all right, lad?” says Carter. “No bones broken, eh?Just a few scratches. “The boy nods, wipes a gob of spit from his forehead and yells at the running children. He seems more irritated than shaken, no tears, no great release of fear in visible relief, just a black scowl and curses, like a cheated merchant who can't abandon his stall to chase a thief.

  The strange thing is, writes Carter, that as soon as the thugs had been scattered I realized Samuel was quite right in at least one of his ideas. You see, this lad Tamuz could easily have broken free of his tormenters and outrun them. If he'd been able to fight, in fact, he could have held his own against these toughs, I'm sure. But as soon as they were gone, well, he just stood there. I only noticed then that one of the little blighters had drawn a circle on the ground around him, you see, and he absolutely refused to cross it. Wouldn't budge an inch. His tormentors had simply been standing out of reach beyond this line drawn in the dust, swinging their sticks and throwing stones and curses at him. A devil indeed, trapped in a circle for the righteous to torment. Or so they clearly thought.

  The line has been scratched in the dust, probably with the same stick that's left its mark on the lad's hand, and the boy's foot moves toward it, pulls back. Shoulders in an almost-shrug, hands up and out, he seems to be groping for an explanation. How can an Englishman understand this? thinks Carter wryly.

  Carter kicks his boot into the dust, breaking the circle, and Tamui cocks his head in curiosity. How can an Englishman understand this?

  “You're Yezidi, yes?”says Carter.

  Ever since Samuel first told me of this tribe of his, well, Anna, I've always been rather sceptical. I've always found his theories fascinating, enlightening even, regardless of what others may say. But with all my time in Kurdistan, with all the Yezidi I've met, fought beside, I've always, to be honest, thought it quite absurd to link their strange customs and beliefs to the Dead Sea Valley of all places. The Yezidi may have their stories of war in heaven, fallen angels and ancient giants, but these are clearly rooted in the Magian and Manichaean heresies native to Persia. The people take their very name from the Persian word for angel, after all. And what with the path that Samuel's research has taken him down these last ten years, well, Samuel's methods have become … unorthodox.

  I have to confess now that he must be on to something. It can't just be a few coincidental correspondences between the Kurdish heresies and the stories of these Enakites, not when I've seen exactly the same thing happen, why, three or four times up around Lake Van—Yezidi children trapped in a circle, harried mercilessly because they absolutely will not step over that line.

  And why?

  The boy knows nothing ofthese Yezidi, but he tries to give an explanation.

  “As Ab Irim said to his servant, Eliezer, “the boy says, “these are the ways we carry with us. From the hills of Irad, we brought these ways. To the city of Ur, we brought these ways. To the city of Haran, we brought these ways. To the cities of Sid-dim, we brought these ways. “

  The boy looks earnest, brow furrowed solemnly as he
repeats the learned formula. Then a smile and a blink.

  Carter wonders if he even knows where these places are, Haran in the north where the Hittites ruled, Ur down in the Mesopotamian delta where civilisation began. And Irad … Eridu, perhaps one of the oldest Sumerian cities? Or Aratta, even? Aratta, which had such strong ties with Sumer that its people were considered cousins, but whkh lay somewhere far to the north in the mountainous region later known as Urartu, in the hills of Ararat.

  As far as the Muslim Kurds and the Christian Armenians are concerned the Yezidi are devil worshippers, if not devils outright. And it is true that they worship a Peacock Angel they call Melek Tawus, the captain of the angels and, like Lucifer, a rebel and an outcast… but in their religion one who's later forgiven, reinstated. But the Yezidi are really not the fiends that they're made out to be. The whole circle thing, as it turns out, is not half as sinister as it might seem. The circle is drawn during disputes, for those who stand in it to testify. I rather think it represents the tribe; to tell a lie whilst within it is to … poison one's whole society, and to refuse to act within its bounds—to leave it, to step over that line—it would be a surrendering of one's very identity as a member of the tribe. The young, I believe, understand the power of the taboo but not the purpose.

  The point is, if this boy is anything to go by, Samuel's Enakites are indeed distant cousins of the Yezidi. I still have no truck with Samuel's fancy that these tales of angels are something more than crass distortions of the Bible. But I am intrigued.

  The boy steps out of the broken circle, taking the offered handkerchief from Carter's hand and dabbing at his scratches. The copper tone of his skin makes sense now. If his people aren ‘t Bedu, aren ‘t Arabs at all… Carter thinks of the old beggar's words: My mother, she teach me many things about the desert, things even the Bedu do not know.

  “Come, Carter Bey,” says Tamuz. “I will take you now. The car is close.”