by Ian Watson
Assassins - Ian Watson & Andy West
Assassins - Ian Watson
Midpoint
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
~ Assassins ~
Book 1 of The Waters of Destiny
IAN WATSON and ANDY WEST
Smashwords edition, copyright 2012
Palabaristas Press
Gijón
First published in 2012.
Copyright (c) 2012 Ian Watson & Andy West.
The moral right of the authors has been asserted.
Cover Design Copyright (c) 2012 Ana Díaz Eiriz.
All rights reserved.
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
www.watersofdestiny.com
~ Assassins ~
Elburz Mountains, Northern Iran: July 1986
Out in the fierce sun Mahmoud was writhing on the rough ground, whimpering. His hands clutched a strip of cloth which Yasuf had evidently bound over his eyes. Not for Mahmoud any sight of the stark peaks surrounding them, nor the heavens beyond, which now he must seek in a different way.
“Let him go to Paradise,” commanded Jafar. “We’re a long way from medical help. A soldier of God can’t be blind.”
Yasuf pulled out Mahmoud’s own pistol. The candidate for eternity screamed a plea and waved his arms frantically.
A single shot rang out. This echoed, amplified, around the empty mountains, becoming many reverberating shots, just as the waters of life and of death would multiply…
An hour earlier, the slow clicking of the metal-detector had risen suddenly to a continuous buzz, like a Geiger-counter near a radioactive source. Except that what they searched for here was potentially much more deadly; yet contained salvation too, Jafar hoped. He’d chosen this type of detector as they could also use it underwater. Its mechanical vibrator made his hand quiver, though his heart quivered more.
“Here!” he called urgently. “I think we’ve found it!”
After almost seven centuries, the floor of the cave as illuminated by the men’s torch-beams was a seamless sea of dusty rubble. Even back in the distant past, it would probably have taken a practised eye to detect that a hole had been hacked out and then camouflaged afterwards.
The predecessors had been cunning. Burial deep inside an isolated cave not only hid the item twice over, but protected the fragile apocalypse it contained from freezing during bitter winters. And a constant level of moderate cold helped with preservation; the blazing heat of summers never reached inside this dark sanctum. Outside in the trembling air of July, sunshine baked a scrub-covered mountain side; but the cave’s interior was cool, almost chill.
Even armed with a painstakingly assembled list of clues, it had taken a very long while indeed to locate this secret place. Or maybe it had taken exactly the right length of time. Enough for the rise of molecular biology, and too for Islam to rouse itself at last, once more becoming militant… here at least in Iran, where Ayatollah Khomeini reigned from his house in Tehran; also in Afghanistan of course, where the Mujahideen Alliance used rockets and guns from the stupid infidel CIA to slaughter atheist Russians. All this allowed them to hi-jack certain sympathies and facilities for their own hidden agenda, pursuing the pure route that long ago Islam should have taken.
“Allah be praised.” The buzz of the detector almost drowned Mahmoud’s murmur, and he repeated more loudly, “Be praised!” Quite so; to make this discovery now was surely His Will. And to find this must be to make use of it, otherwise why the finding?
Two of the four men in the cave, Yasuf and Ali, were armed. Discarding the metal detector, Jafar knelt. With gloved hands, he and Mahmoud began lifting aside stones large and small, until both men sweated.
Half an hour later, torchlight played upon a Samarkand carpet, costly in its time and now a rare if musty antique. Carefully unfolding the delicate but intact fabric revealed a chest of black wood. The lid was exquisitely inlaid with silver Arabic, its style of calligraphy late medieval.
“Beware,” read Jafar. “For the water of death is within.”
“Let us hope the water of life too, praise the Prophet,” said Ali. “I don’t suppose there could be two chests? Another, hidden elsewhere?”
Underneath the carpet’s mustiness, Jafar scented fear borne on sweat. His own? Or Mahmoud’s, who crouched next to him? Cold apprehension, blended with triumph, stretched all their faces into ambivalent grins.
“Obviously they inscribed a warning on the lid,” he responded, “not an invitation, in case someone ignorant stumbled upon this.”
“You mean someone who couldn’t read? As used to be mostly the case.” Ali could sound flippant at times. Perhaps this was the young man’s personal way of coping with the exigencies of holy war and of death, and consequently of being reliable in that war, but Mahmoud frowned at him reproachfully.
It took three of them to heave the chest out of its stone bed and place it gingerly on a level space of the cave floor. They propped their torches on rocks and gathered about the dark artefact. A carved knot of writhing monkeys, with staring pits of eyes, surrounded a large keyhole. Underneath, inlaid in humble copper turned green and in a less elaborate script than the silver, were the words ‘pray to me’.
Jafar’s veins thrummed. He scarcely believed this was real and not myth, yet he felt chosen, nominated as God’s warrior for the ultimate task. He fished from his bag the Key of the Imams, which featured seven teeth of varying lengths. Months earlier, it had proved difficult to retrieve the weighty brass object; onlookers at the local beauty spot of Lake Evan, crouched at the feet of the mountains, had been intensely curious about a search of its muddy bottom. But eventually and discreetly the precious item was found, sealed inside a glazed pot of Persian blue.
It was much better to have the key. Forcing their way inside not only risked losing the contents, but also their lives in a terrible disaster. Yet at that moment his hand hung in doubt before the sacred chest.
“What does it mean?” he questioned earnestly of his God.
Ali’s eyes shone devilishly in the upward pointing beams.
“Open it!” he urged.
Still Jafar hesitated.
“Our brethren of old were trained in the arts,” he cautioned, “even as we are.”
Jafar recollected the Black Stone secured by a silver band and silver nails to the eastern corner of the Ka’aba in Mecca. Rarely for an Ismaili, he’d been on the Hajj. When the pilgrims were perambulating around the great cube, Jafar had been able to quickly stoop and kiss the sacred stone that was the same colour as this chest.
Pray to me.
Towards Mecca? But the elite of the ancient Nizari Order, those who had hidden this terrible power from the world, would surely not have bowed towards Mecca in their prayers. They had transcended such things.
Impatiently, Mahmoud plucked the key from Jafar’s hand and knelt before the chest. He inserted the object and, with some difficulty, twisted it. A loud click issued forth.
“Two more to go,” exclaimed Ali. Yet even as he spoke, a peculiar whine and a simultaneous sigh emanated from inside the aged walls of wood. Mahmoud snapped up straight.
“Dust!” he spluttered, rubbing his eyes.
Jafar breathed a sigh of relief. Nothing serious.
“Turn it again.”
But Mahmoud was blinking furiously now, and gasping too.
“Shit! It hurts. Aah it… ahh…”
Pray to me.
They should have obeyed!
Mahmoud clutched at his eyes and squealed.
“Water!” yelle
d Jafar. Their water was outside. “Get him to the entrance! Get him out!”
Yasuf dragged Mahmoud up and pulled him away. Moments later, blood-curdling screams entered the cave, echoing around within it. But even as the cries of pain diminished, Jafar’s keen mind dismissed them.
Pray to me.
When the fourth Master of Alamut, Hasan Ali, declared the qiyama, the new age, the Resurrection, he’d done so with his back to Mecca, emphasising the overthrow of dogmatic Shari’ah law, which insisted that worshippers face the holy city. Yet in subsequent centuries the true Nizari faith couldn’t always be practised openly. Harsh political realities had at times forced the Nizaris into taqiyyah, dissimulation, their tactic to avoid persecution. In such cruel times they’d pretended to once again obey Shari’ah law, the pedantic law of the vast Sunni majority. Was this chest buried during the blessed decades of the qiyama? Or later, after Jalal al-Din Hasan, the sixth Master, had re-imposed Shari’ah practices?
“Do you have your compass?” he asked of Ali.
Jafar reasoned and fervently hoped that, whether or not dissimulation was in force, the super-elite of the Nizari Ismailis would still have prayed with their backs to the mihrab, the niche that pointed to Mecca. This would demonstrate their pure spiritual state, their high ascent above ordinary rules. And most likely their booby-traps were designed to harm lowly initiates and the over-eager and despised unbelievers alike, as Ali had unfortunately just discovered. Only the super-elite were ever intended to regain this buried power.
For once without comment, Ali had drawn a bush-knife from his boot and flipped the compass out from its hilt. Under Jafar’s direction they got the deadly chest as level as they could using a makeshift plumb-line, then turned it so that the front precisely faced Mecca. To kneel before the keyhole, was now to have one’s back to the holy city.
“We aren’t meant to actually pray to the box,” Jafar explained. “That’d be blasphemy. But in a physical sense we must obey its instruction literally, and in exactly the same fashion as our ancient brethren. Then we’ll be safe.”
Ali nodded nervously. “Sure,” he said. “Whatever. Just don’t expect me to turn that key again!”
Jafar considered covering the chest with their shirts and shemaghs, particularly those monkeys’ eyes. But a sudden calm settled upon him and an inner light filled his mind, a gleam of the Nur, God’s light, granted him at this critical time. He was chosen for this ritual, and he knew he’d interpreted the signs. He must take this test, and he would pass it. He knelt as though to pray and, open-eyed, he turned the key once more.
Once more came the click, and to his momentary dismay the whining sigh too. But no dust issued from the staring simians, and his shock soon passed.
A third sequence, just the same, except that this time the lid shifted noticeably.
Jafar bent forward and opened the chest. Ali peered over his shoulder.
The unexpected size and weight were explained. Thick copper lined the inside. Waxed and twisted cables held a casket suspended in the centre.
The mechanism of the booby trap was also laid bare. Thin wires ran from the lock up to three copper tubes, down which glass or steel balls had no doubt dropped to create a pulse of air. Fed to narrower piping for an increase in pressure, and of course to pick up the poisonous powder, these led to the front of the chest. Yet a paper-thin gap separated them from the holes of the monkey’s eyes. And into this gap, by way of a fluted channel, had slid a wafer of ivory so thin it was transparent, preventing the toxic cloud from blowing out. The wafer was attached to a large and primitive needle-compass, suspended by a thin thread. Only on the current and exact geographic orientation of the chest would the simple trap be disabled in this way.
Dazed and high on reaction to shock, Jafar thanked the true Imam and God profusely. On that centuries-old thread, his sight had hung.
Sensing that danger had passed, Ali knelt by his comrade.
Jafar failed to steady his shaking hands, as he unlatched and opened the inner casket. Inside were two further lids, covered with embroidered red velvet. One was labelled ‘life’, the other, ‘death’.
“They’re both here!” rejoiced Ali.
Jafar took a pen from his top pocket and flipped open the life lid. A row of hand-blown bottles in greenish glass lay snug in padded beds. Clear liquid within them reflected back glimmers of torchlight. The bottles appeared to be sealed with a honey-coloured wax.
More cautiously, he peeked into death. It looked no different, except that those bottles were sealed with black wax.
Jafar was tense with passion. “Behold the gift of the Assassins, the gift of God,” he whispered.
“Allah Akbar,” responded Ali reverently. He reached forward, clearly intent on grasping one of those delicate, fascinating vessels, holding water that could save or damn entire populations.
The moment shattered.
Jafar grabbed the young man’s arm. “No! We don’t know whether the seals are fully intact!”
Ali snatched back his hand and leapt away, fear spilling from his eyes.
“Go back,” shouted Jafar. “Get the gloves and medical cases. The medium-sized aluminium ones should do.”
As the echoes of that gunshot died away, Jafar felt nearer to heaven, and powerful. By way of their ancient brethren, whom only the weight of the Mongol hordes had been able to humble, God had granted them the gift of an ultimate weapon: intricate essences bequeathed from the very first global conflict.
According to the most persuasive interpretation of their secret writings, the ingenuity of the Assassins had produced something beyond their own wildest dreams and nightmares, the use of which the Assassins themselves couldn’t possibly have optimised or controlled, all those centuries ago.
Unlike now…
Now the time was ripe. A black tide would devour their enemies as the water of death swept away the very foundations of Sunni and Christian and heathen civilisations alike, thus revealing the golden grains of the one true people.
Mahmoud was in heaven now. The gunshot that had sent him there celebrated his sacrifice and the future victory. Had anyone else in these mountains heard the thundering of the shot, and wondered? Perhaps, perhaps not. Let the world pay no further attention for twenty years or more…!
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Cambridge, Massachusetts: April
From her office window, Abigail Leclaire admired swathes of tulips amid the Spring greenery of Radcliffe Yard. The peaceful oval was flanked by modest buildings in old red brick, watched over by their ordered rows of windows. Those could almost be houses; like an academical village, to use Thomas Jefferson’s phrase.
Sadly, in the Fall, her year as a stipendiary fellow would finish and she’d need to confront the future. Her original plan of reclaiming her teaching post for freshman history back in Canada, at Montreal’s McGill University, would no doubt cause a big problem for Terry. Well, her spirit yearned for something better, something more exciting. Anyhow, the Fall was still far off.
Her first book, The Medieval Woman, based on her doctoral thesis, had been well received; and her application for one of the fifty annual stipends of $60,000, plus project expenses, had to her joy succeeded. Radcliffe, once a women’s college and now part of Harvard, prided itself on matters female, as the huge holdings of old cookbooks in its Shlesinger Library bore witness; though Abigail never mentioned that to most men, in case they got a wrong impression about female scholarship.
Just as Terry may have gotten the wrong impression of her?
In theory Radcliffe no longer prioritised women’s issues, but the theme of her project application couldn’t have harmed her chances, especially these days: Troubadours and Arab Women Poets: the Gentling of Europe.
Her premise was that the poets of al-Andalus, the Arab name for the south of Spain which they’d ruled, greatly influenced the troubadours of southern France, not least in a new sensitivity to male-female relationships and emotions; thus respect and
politeness and courtly love were born – and Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine groomed her somewhat thuggish knights to become chivalrous. More generally, Arabic culture mellowed Christian Europe, especially regarding attitudes to women, even as militant Christians were gearing up to drive the Arabs out of Spain and destroy Islamic civilisation there.
Her own angle was that the women poets of al-Andalus, the ‘poetisas’, played a major role in the gentling process, their work included in the many poems from al-Andalus that were translated into Provençal. Though few women authors in Arab Spain were famous – due to a general lack of opportunity much bemoaned by Arab intellectuals at the time – one historian had listed more than forty poetisas. Unfortunately much of their work appeared to have been lost. Yet there were stars such as Walladah bint al-Mustakfi of Córdoba, or the renowned Fatima, who was also a rare book collector par excellence on behalf of Caliph Hakam II, a ruler who’d devoted his life to establishing public libraries.
Abigail was determined to make a case for the poetisas, and Harvard’s Centre for Middle Eastern Studies had texts in its library which scholars had scarcely yet examined.
True, the topic was quite specialised and mightn’t result in a second book as such, but at least a monograph of 50 or 60 pages for an academic journal; and who knows what she might yet find?
Having only just started to learn Arabic, she reluctantly acknowledged this was a hurdle, but she relished challenges. Unfortunately, so far, Arabic seemed to be largely eluding her.
Terry had once said she needed ‘impossible’ challenges! What made him say that?
She’d been coming at the subject from the French side, being from Montreal and raised bilingually. That first book of hers might more accurately have been titled The French Medieval Woman! She could read medieval French easily and cope with medieval Provençal too, nor was her Spanish bad after long holidays in Mexico; just as well, considering the amount of scholarly works in Spanish about the various Arab Emirates and Caliphates of al-Andalus.