Assassins - Ian Watson & Andy West

by Ian Watson

  “Right.” Diminished, but not puppy-dog.

  “OK. Later.”

  She hung up.

  It was 10.37 am. She’d only got to bed around 6.30 am. She flopped back down onto her pillow, and wondered why life was so difficult sometimes.

  Southern Ethiopia: October 1156

  The Priest-Witch’s name was Arwe, and he was reputed to be a hundred years old. From Yaqob, their interpreter between Arabic and Oromiffa, the common local language, Hakim and Sadiq learned that Arwe took his name from a potent ‘serpent king’ of ancient times, who was killed by an ancestor of Bilqis, the Queen of Sheba. Arwe was both famous and feared in this rain-forested region of southern Ethiopia, a vast land of great contrasts. Indeed, once Yaqob had grasped that Hakim’s mission was to discover any traditions concerned with pestilence, their guide-interpreter fell into a strange mood, brooding overnight. Only the next day did he finally recommend a long journey to consult the redoubtable Arwe, though for an increased payment due to risk. Yet Yaqob’s modest greed had reassured Hakim, rather than irritating him.

  So eventually Yaqob had brought Hakim and Sadiq and their three slave porters to a distant village of tall straw huts surrounded by banana groves, close to a sluggish river where crocodiles basked. At first sight a rather backward village, although extensive and visibly armed with spears and bows.

  And at first sight the famed Priest-Witch seemed decrepit, as one might reasonably expect if he was truly so ancient. Bald but for a few white hairs, Arwe’s face was rutted with wrinkles. His limbs looked like knotty sinew dried in the sun and wrapped around bones, as though, with potions and conjurations and purifying encounters with spirits that only he could see, he had slowly mummified himself alive. His only finery was a belt of bright beads over a whitish sleeveless robe, which appeared on him more like the shroud for a victim of starvation. Yet his dark, piercing eyes!

  Hakim presented a fine brass tray as a gift, uncertain whether the value was too high. Or maybe too low?

  Hospitality proved to be the boiled meat of some forest creature, steeped in a sauce made from fiery hot peppers and pungent onions. This stew was poured onto the brass tray itself to be shared, each man scooping with torn pieces of a red and spicy pancake-shaped sourbread. Was the tray used out of politeness, or as a rebuke? Was the burning of one’s mouth by the sauce a culinary treat or a trial by ordeal? Or maybe a way of making the meat safer to eat? Hakim perspired; he certainly felt it as a trial!

  There followed interminable chewing of bitter green leaves, apparently to enliven the mind.

  Arwe listened intently rather than responding, head cocked, as beady-eyed as a parrot who seemed intent on memorising the words of these strangers from afar. Hakim spoke with a customary passion he suspected Yaqob couldn’t or didn’t convey in translation, though both speakers were hampered by the cud in their mouths.

  From time to time, Arwe asked questions of Sadiq, as though addressing these directly to Hakim might allow Hakim’s responses to cast some influence over him, perhaps letting his principal visitor achieve too much presence. Was this a form of respect, or was it insulting?

  Sadiq described himself as a colleague and close friend of Hakim, though his tone suggested that disciple was closer to the truth. Only by exposing his apocalyptic vision to Sadiq, by adding fuel to existing religious fervour, had Hakim acquired a necessary and dedicated companion for this scientific venture.

  As the afternoon wore on, Arwe’s questioning of Sadiq about what Arab doctors did to heal their sick intensified; and sometimes the ancient man grinned toothlessly in a superior way. With a great effort of will, Hakim remained composed, yet it seemed hours before Arwe deigned to react directly, fully acknowledging him.

  Translated by Yaqob, Arwe said enigmatically, “Spirits from the other world live in monkeys. Let us go to the house of the monkeys and listen to their cries.”

  Hakim was taken aback, mentally groping for a connection. Would he need to repeat what he had already said all over again, to monkeys?

  Arwe uttered an order. Within a minute, strong young men brought a carved throne of black wood to his door, portable on thick bamboo poles, to which Arwe hobbled. Although he moved awkwardly, his gait seemed more spry than enfeebled.

  They wended past a dozen huts until they came to a great bamboo cage where monkeys at once commenced an outcry, then fell strangely silent. The animals had thick brownish fur, though on some it was as if ochre or crushed nettles were rubbed in. Strangely man-like hands and feet were black-skinned, the faces too, these adorned by white brows and wispy white beards. The males sported blue scrotal sacs and red penises. Access for food, without risk of the confined monkeys escaping, was a bamboo door opening into a much smaller inner cage, itself equipped with a door. A big clay bowl held water. Hakim couldn’t see much excrement, so dung must be raked out regularly. A villager armed with a spear stood guard.

  Arwe addressed the monkeys in his local language, which Yaqob couldn’t translate.

  Next, the old man seemed to go into a trance, his eyelids fluttering.

  Several monkeys rushed to the bars, baring teeth, then crying out raucously. One chattering male masturbated, jerking semen from itself.

  Presently Arwe returned to himself and spoke, evidently in Oromiffa, for Yaqob translated: “Our Gods permit you to stay.”

  Southern Ethiopia: May 1157

  One morning the Priest-Witch and his visitors were talking over coffee. The brass pot and glass cups they used were another gift from Hakim to the old man. Two further pots of local manufacture had also been filled. Hakim was glad Arwe had chosen coffee to enliven their minds and not the bitter green leaves, for one of his molars had developed a nagging twinge that was made worse by prolonged chewing.

  Sitting cross-legged with them and twitching his feet, was Guba, a man perhaps in his forties, Arwe’s assistant and already appointed as his future successor. Guba’s eyes bulged as though magnified by curved glass. Obviously a defect in the glands at the base of his neck was responsible, and a good cure was to eat seaweeds, unavailable here. Hakim had in his baggage a bottle of the stinging violet liquid produced from seaweed, which he used to stop wounds from festering. Diluted down, this would control Guba’s condition, but Arwe had brusquely rejected Hakim’s offer of treatment. Those protruding orbs of eyes made Guba appear… visionary, a quality which evidently Arwe wished for in his successor. Restless activity was also associated with the complaint. Maybe before Arwe died, the Priest-Witch would confide to his heir which plants from what soils could lessen the symptoms. Or perhaps Guba already knew, yet preferred to appear urgently perceptive.

  By now Hakim had seen Arwe banish malarial fever from a woman, by using a potion and incantations. She soon stopped shaking and sweating and claimed that her pounding headache had vanished. With a poultice and more of his spells, he cured a wounded foot that had looked gangrenous. While Hakim thought the rituals of magic might provide a mental benefit for patients who were certain of the shaman’s spiritual powers, he nevertheless fully acknowledged the impressive range and depth of Arwe’s understanding of the body and of natural remedies.

  In a cautious exchange of knowledge with Hakim, Arwe had begun to confide some explanations of his spirit-inspired choices. All the while, Hakim had to bear in mind the Priest-Witch’s certainty that spirits resided in animals, in plants, even in rocks, a belief very different from the Qu’ran’s declarations that jinn were created from smokeless fire and inhabited an immaterial world. As often as Hakim deemed diplomatic, he would mention plague and its signs and its possible sources.

  The coffee was less than half drunk when a runner came to Arwe’s door and jabbered.

  Having heard the man’s gasped words, Arwe went into a semi-trance while he took the messenger’s head in his hands, and licked delicately at his face like a snake, and sniffed him, and chanted for a long while, his eyes rolling up whitely. Then he issued orders.

  The black throne on its bamboo pol
es was brought.

  “What interests you,” Yaqob translated, “has come to… it’s the name of a village half a day’s travel from here, I think. You’ll see what you most wish, if you dare.”

  “Surely the old man means plague!” exclaimed Sadiq. “Allah is great to let us witness this so soon. It might have taken years. And surely He will protect you and me, otherwise He would not offer this example so willingly, that we may probe and seek understanding.”

  Hakim nodded, yet thought to himself: If it is His will, Allah shall indeed safeguard me because of my mission. But you too, good Sadiq? Not inevitably.

  A big woven basket containing bread hung from the back of Arwe’s throne as his four porters bore him from the village, accompanied by Hakim, Sadiq and Yaqob. Spears and bows lay alongside the throne on either side, in case the porters suddenly needed to set down their burden and become warriors. A couple of other armed villagers paced alongside, also one of the Arabs’ slaves, burdened with gourds of water stoppered with leaves. Men clutching bows were now guarding the approach to the village with much more vigilance than Hakim had previously seen. There’d been a lull for many months in sporadic hostilities with a community an hour away to the west; evidently the runner’s news from the south had caused Arwe to alert the sentries.

  The Priest-Witch chuckled dryly, for he had noticed Hakim noticing.

  By way of Yaqob: “From today if a stranger approaches, even if he appears full of health, the guards will shout once, Go away! If the stranger ignores this, then they will kill him with arrows and leave his body where it lies for a moon and a week.”

  Hakim’s heart leapt within his chest. At last! Arwe was displaying rare knowledge on the subject of plague. The Priest-Witch understood the period between plague putting its seed into a person, and the harvest of that seed suddenly flaring up! Typically, Arwe had refrained from saying this directly but only dropped a hint, no doubt to see whether Hakim would beg for clarification. At times the old man could be so miserly with information! Well, hard-won wisdom was after all Arwe’s source of power. Yet occasionally he would offer a surprise nugget of knowledge, as if perhaps he wished to spin out his visitors’ stay for his own stimulation. What more did the Priest-Witch know about plague? Possibly much more than Hakim had gleaned from the libraries of the civilised world!

  “Guba isn’t with us,” commented Sadiq. “We say that it’s foolish to carry both eggs in the same hand.” Which Yaqob translated.

  “I shall never die from plague,” declared Arwe, “even though my death is surely due.”

  Considering Arwe’s greatly advanced years, in fact overdue, Hakim reluctantly admitted. Allah, preserve this useful pagan a while longer!

  “Nor will my successor ever die from plague!”

  How could he be so sure? But Hakim believed the Priest-Witch, ecstatically sensing great knowledge and power nearly within his own grasp.

  Hakim beheld the aftermath of a hell-on-Earth. The survivors, if any there were, must have fled into the forest.

  Red-mouthed hyenas were feeding on scores of corpses sprawled higgledy-piggledy among deserted huts; corpses that even from a distance looked ugly and suppurating, and seemed to have been tossed hither and thither as though by demons who had also foully tormented them. Beside this scene even the massacres of war might seem clean, almost merciful yet also, Hakim knew, far less effective. Carrion birds hopped about, vile scraps hanging from their beaks.

  Jabbering, Arwe’s bearers’ set him down, their limbs trembling not from the extended exertion of the journey, but in abject fright.

  The Arabs’ slave moaned in terror, and Yaqob shuddered. “I not go more,” he said, grammar driven from his mind.

  Arwe seemed unconcerned. Toting a bag, he rose from his black seat and directed an abrupt order at Hakim.

  “Yaqob!” snapped Hakim. “Translate!”

  “He said, support me.”

  Arwe had darted glances at Hakim and at the others, yet he was cocking his head towards the yapping of hyenas rather than staring directly at the terrible spectacle. It occurred to Hakim then that the old man’s piercing eyes must actually be quite short-sighted. If so, the horrors that Hakim saw clearly must still be quite blurred for the Priest-Witch. Maybe the spirit-world was easier to see, or to imagine, in a luminous blur!

  Aware of the precaution he should take, Hakim tied a fabric mask in place over his mouth and nose, then duly clutched the wizened Priest-Witch under one armpit, easily taking his pathetic weight as Arwe set one bare foot before the other. More brusque words in Oromiffa. Yaqob’s tremulous voice. “Come to feast your eyes! Come!”

  And to feast Arwe’s eyes too, once he was close enough to focus.

  Hakim realised that he wasn’t propelling the Priest-Witch so much as being dragged forward against his will. With a prayer, Hakim advanced, breathing deeply to calm himself and quell his fears. Such would be the scene if his quest succeeded, he reminded himself, yet vastly multiplied in many lands. God’s enemies would be felled by God’s own instrument.

  Let it be!

  “Stay where you are, Sadiq,” Hakim called out behind him, serene now as they drew closer, becoming coolly observant...

  His professional eye picked out angry red spots and black sores, festering boils and slimy pustules, swellings, limbs twisted askew, liquefied guts and unidentifiable deliquescing organs seeping through hyena-torn bellies. The festering vomit wasn’t merely dark with flies, but blackened. The smell was fouler than the contents of any diseased and shit-filled bowel, yet laced too with a nauseating sweetness.

  Arwe hissed like a cat at hyenas that bared their yellow teeth, and he gestured splay-fingered, hypnotically, until the animals whined and reluctantly withdrew to worry at more distant corpses. Some way off, Hakim spied a pile of charred branches, the remains of what must have been a big bonfire. Probably evidence of fearful villagers burning the earliest kin to fall victim, before the situation became uncontrollable.

  Evidently unafraid, Arwe hobbled among the dead bodies, pointing at ghastly signs they’d discussed before and uttering single words, some of which Hakim knew by now. Then the Priest-Witch stopped by the ruined corpse of a young man, jerking a knobbed finger demandingly at the sharp knife Hakim always wore. Hakim handed over the blade, after which Arwe mimed being helped to kneel. Hakim complied, then was gestured back a pace or two. Oh yes, in case pressure of gas in the body caused foul liquids to spray.

  Arwe slit open the abdomen, laid down the knife, then with his bare hands tugged yielding flesh wide. Exerting himself far more than Hakim had believed possible, the old man proceeded to break ribs and wrench them apart. This laid bare what Hakim, stepping closer again and bending, could identify as a livid, bluish heart and lungs that were blotched black. Lower down the corpse and deep within, he scrutinised what must be a liver, yet swollen to twice the usual size. Below this, the gall-bladder leaked thick and fatty black bile. The writhe of pale guts, ressembling the dissolving arms and legs of tiny infants, knees and elbows all bent and jumbled together in an obscene stew, bore a thousand black spots as though being consumed by feasting beetles.

  Arwe took from his bag a container of bamboo not quite as wide as his wrist, and removed its stopper, a plug of clay. The bamboo, its top rim sharp, looked greased inside. Then the old man thrust this device at the victim’s scrotum, twisted to cut, and captured the soft black oyster of a testicle, for what private purpose of witchcraft Hakim had no idea.

  This done, Arwe seemed utterly exhausted. Hakim had to practically carry him back to his throne.

  And so having seen the unimaginable, they departed, much to the relief of the rest of the party.

  An hour later, a fit of coughing shook the old man as he was borne along, Hakim pacing alongside. Finally Arwe spat out a gob of dirty phlegm, and then, breathing hard, he began to gasp words, as though of a sudden mortality haunted him, and he wished in Guba’s absence to confide some legacy of wisdom to Hakim.

  Yaqob
translated. “Plague. From evil spirit. Makes home in monkey.”

  “Yes?” urged Hakim and Sadiq, almost with one voice.

  “Most spirits in monkeys… benign. Some sublime. So we worship. Others naughty. Make mischief, small mischief. A few very bad. Often monkey with evil spirit… weeps, so very sad because made to do evil. Weeps and weeps.”

  Hakim reinforced all this in his memory, hoping soon to make notes, repeating to himself: plague lives in monkeys, and those monkeys that harbour it often weep. What did this signify? A few months earlier Hakim might have dismissed this as a fanciful tale. Not now. He was all too aware of Arwe’s depth of experience and insight. Merciful Allah, preserve this old pagan a while more! Even so, an evil spirit in a monkey…?

  At that moment, it was as though a muezzin wailed from a minaret within his mind: From Ethiopia the empire of Axum exported along the Red Sea gold and grain, rhino horns, and MONKEYS!

  ‘Elephant Walk’, Cambridge, Massachusetts: May

  The crisp atmosphere and inspiring light of recent days had gone, sealed off from New England by a leaden lid of cloud. Rain streaks chased each other down the windows of Elephant Walk, distorting the hurrying humanity of Cambridge into ungainly creatures with poorly applied blotches of colour.

  Abigail had arrived early, trying to claim the military high ground. She removed soaking outer layers and hoped the restaurant’s warmth would soon evaporate uncomfortable damp patches from the rest of her clothes. A meaty aroma sharpened by exotic herbs awoke her hunger. The place was mainly Thai cuisine, with some Cambodian. Jack came in. The downpour had left him unscathed, Abigail noted sourly. He was folding up an enormous golfing umbrella.

  He spotted her, coming over and sitting down without a greeting. “Your nose is wet,” he then observed with a grin.

  Patriarchal crap, thought Abigail, but the approach of a waiter prevented her from spitting out a rude reply.