Assassins - Ian Watson & Andy West

by Ian Watson

  She ordered something very spicy. Without even looking at the menu, Jack ordered the same.

  “Glad you could make it,” he offered.

  “Did I have a choice?”

  “I thought you’d relish the opportunity to instruct on medieval history, and maybe help America too of course. We’ve always been big buddies with Canada.”

  Abigail got the message and gave a noncommittal grunt. No doubt he had the power to get her thrown out of the country. She swallowed her pride and bit down on her resentment at narrow-minded government agencies.

  “What do you want to know?” she asked, managing a business-like if not actually pleasant tone.

  Jack’s face crinkled with supercilious amusement.

  “Our language folks tell me that Alamut derives from the Arabic for teaching of the eagle.”

  “That would figure. An eagle is supposed to have shown Hasan as-Sabah, the first Master of the Assassins, where to build his fortress.”

  “They also said that the word assassin originally meant those who take hashish, and these particular ones specialised in high-risk missions to murder political and religious leaders. Apparently they took out the Christian King of Jerusalem in 1192.” Jack leaned forward. All trace of humour had left him and his blue eyes seemed cold and accusatory. “Are we facing a bunch of drug-crazed suicide merchants here?”

  Abigail felt her jaw drop. She struggled to make it work again but words spluttered at her lips.

  “Not unless they’re ghosts!” she finally and indignantly got out.

  The food arrived quickly.

  “You’re being ridiculous!” hissed Abigail. “The Mongols…”

  “Yeah yeah, I know. The mighty Mongol hordes wiped out Alamut in 1256. And practically everything else in their path too, like army ants.”

  Jack was relaxed now and his eyes gleamed. His mouth pulled into a boyish curl. She realised with dismay he’d been trying to rattle her. It had worked.

  “But it wouldn’t be the first time an old tradition had been resurrected and bent to modern aspirations,” he casually continued. “What about the Freemasons claiming lineage from the Templars and borrowing their rituals? Anyhow, if that old poem of yours is a link to all this, your own research has it as almost a hundred years after Alamut, at least mid-fourteenth century.”

  As Abigail forked a mouthful of food, her thoughts racing, warmth invaded her cheeks and neck. Jack’s stumbling guesses had brought him far too close to territory she’d only explored herself the other night. Could he tell a guilty flush from spice-heat?

  He couldn’t possibly know about Sinaldin and Guy and their grandfathers and knightly Orders and the plague, she told herself. Nor did she want him to know, until she’d sorted out all the connections and implications herself. And there couldn’t possibly be a modern connection. Yet an image of Trinity church in the Hancock Tower came to mind; hadn’t she thought herself about old purpose and old words serving new aims?

  Get a grip Abby. It seemed more than likely that ICE might be hoping to justify an increased persecution of Islam, by scaring elected officials with horror stories of ancient militant sects rising up from the past. She hid her reaction inside anger, easy enough to do.

  “If you have your own language people and no doubt history people too, why do you need me?” she demanded.

  “I like a wide range of sources,” mumbled Jack through a full mouth. “They rarely agree, hence the cracks through which an investigation might proceed are quickly revealed.” He swallowed, then gasped and reached for water. “Hey, this is hot. Besides, to be frank, my people lack imagination.”

  Abigail couldn’t resist. “Hell, you more than make up for them. You’ve got far too much. Or maybe it’s just paranoia,” she added tartly.

  Jack glared over the edge of his glass as his Adam’s apple bobbed. Abigail lightened her tone and spoke hurriedly on.

  “Well here’s one small crack for you. The word assassin probably doesn’t come from hashashin, the literal Arabic for those who eat hashish. Hashashin was used as a general term for disreputable people. I guess it was bad to take drugs even then. That survived into modern times as the Egyptian hashasheen, meaning riotous or rowdy. I guess the Nizaris’ enemies might have used it in that sense. But the sect itself considered they were the guardians of knowledge, or perhaps more accurately guardians of secrets. The Arabic assasseen means ‘guardian’. A much closer match, don’t you think?”

  “You see you’re damn useful already! Did the concept of assassins and assassination not exist before this cult, then? Leaving aside bumping off Julius Caesar and such.”

  “Oh yes. Another earlier Shi’a group were called the stranglers, for instance. But the Nizari sect was simply the most systematic and dedicated at exercising this um… method of control. You might say they laid the ground-rules for the assassination industry, and their name became the label for that industry. It crept into European use via Italy’s contacts with the Levant. The first well-known association of a wicked killer with the word assassin is in Dante’s The Divine Comedy.”

  “Wow. Diabolical operators.” Jack was sweating and his cheeks were flushed. He was clearly finding the Gaeng Ped out of his culinary league. Uncharitable but satisfying amusement leaked over Abigail’s thoughts.

  “No worse than many at the time and more since. In the grand competition of history, you might regard the Nizaris as a targeted instrument of surgical precision. By comparison the so-called Holy Inquisition was a blunt tool for torture and extermination used indiscriminately.”

  Abigail flashed what she hoped was a superior smile. She’d used this example purely to attack Jack’s prejudice and remind him that Christianity too had nasty skeletons in the cupboard. She was beginning to enjoy herself, though faintly heard instinct told her this was dangerous.

  Jack sucked in more water and pulled out a handkerchief to dab at his neck.

  “You called them Nizaris,” he wheezed. Clearing his throat, he carried on in more normal tones, though his voice still scraped. “So what precisely does that mean and what secrets were they guarding? And what drove them? What especially drove them to carry out political killings?”

  Cooled by damp clothes and well used to Thai spices, Abigail finished a mouthful and gazed at him with perfect composure. Well, she acknowledged, he earned a mark for attentiveness at least.

  “You know about the Sunni and Shi’a branches of Islam, I take it?”

  “Sure. Been tearing each other apart in Iraq for years.”

  “The Shi’a only amount to about ten percent of all Muslims.” Jack’s eyes registered mild surprise, but he wasn’t going to admit this and remained silent. “Yet they are themselves split into several divisions,” continued Abigail. “These arose from schisms over the succession of the Imamate.” She paused, wondering how to compress centuries of religious diversification into just a few sentences.

  “I’m all ears,” prompted Jack.

  “Okay, well there were just twelve lineal Imams after the Prophet Muhammad, the Messenger of God. Twelve divinely inspired guides, descended in the line of the Prophet’s blood. The first was Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali. The second and third were Ali’s sons by the Prophet’s daughter, Fatimah. Most Shi’ites acknowledge all twelve, and also believe the twelfth will return one day – he went into hiding you see, but over a thousand years ago.”

  “Heck, that’s a great act of faith.”

  “Isn’t all religion just an act of blind faith?”

  “Acceptance of God is a certainty, nothing blind about it! Uh… sorry, carry on.”

  Abigail briefly wondered whether she’d touched a nerve.

  “Anyhow, the bulk of the Shi’ites are called Twelvers for their belief in the full line. A smaller group think this line went wrong after the sixth Imam. They believe the Imamate should have passed through Ismail, the sixth Imam’s eldest son, who in fact died before his father but had eligible offspring.

  “These dissenters a
re known as Ismailis or Seveners, since they dispute the seventh Imam and the line thereafter. And because of an earlier dispute over two brothers, another schismatic group are known as Fivers. Are you keeping up?”

  Jack was frowning.

  “Yeah, but get to the Nizaris, and don’t make it so dry.”

  Abigail shrugged. “You wanted a history lesson… Well, the Twelvers and the Seveners both spawned several sub-groups over the years. The Seveners peaked in the Middle Ages when the Fatimids, an Ismaili dynasty, conquered Egypt and ruled it for about two hundred years. Half-way through, around the end of the tenth century, schism struck again.

  “At that date leadership of all the Ismailis went along with the Fatimid throne. Nizar, the rightful heir, was pushed aside by his younger brother and put to death. That was just the excuse Ismailis in Syria and Palestine needed to break away from Egyptian Fatimid control. Their rather inspired leader, Hasan as-Sabah, he of the eagle’s nest, claimed that Nizar was merely ‘hidden’. Hasan set himself up as the only ‘gate’ to Nizar, whom his people still followed; hence of course Nizaris. Hasan created a power-base among mountain tribes, and propagated a mystical form of Ismaili doctrine that became increasingly divorced from practically any mainstream ideas. Said doctrine was backed by fortresses and tactical acts of political murder. The sect of the Assassins was born. Later Ismailis rewrote history to make Hasan himself an Imam, which for their sect means the Imam, since there can only be one at a time in direct descent.”

  “There’s more fractures than a piece of ancient pottery,” Jack complained.

  “There’s as many if not more fractures within Christianity. I guess you could say most religions age in a similar way, becoming more brittle. Usually geography or population shift or imbalance in military technology leads to politics that provoke a schism. The amount of pomposity in church becomes the rival flags for Protestants versus Catholics, then Puritans versus Protestants. How silly is that?”

  Jack had abandoned a third of his food and was cooling down, but if anything he looked still more uncomfortable.

  “You can only think like that if you don’t believe. Different expressions of religion are channels which men try to navigate towards their God. But men are fallible, so may take wrong turns, and the Devil sets up diversions, perhaps even whole routes that are wrong.”

  Abigail was astonished. Her opinion of Jack, that she thought couldn’t possibly get any lower, dropped off the bottom of the scale. An immigration enforcer and a religious fundamentalist.

  “Let me guess,” she ventured. “Your interpretation is the right one. Which church are you?”

  Jack didn’t look as if he’d heard. His discomfort was gone and his poise was one of carved triumph. His eyes gleamed with an odd mix of determination and desire, reminding her of grooms who stood at the altar.

  “God rewards those who seek him truly.”

  Abigail managed to keep her face straight, but quivered inside. This was scary before. Now it seemed far worse. Fundamentalists didn’t adhere to logic. She decided it was best to move on.

  “You asked about the Nizari policy of political murders,” she stated neutrally. “You have to understand that the sect was stateless, or at most a scattered state – their small territorial islands were strewn over the countries or empires of the time. Each island was impregnable in itself – at least until the military tsunami of the Mongols crashed through – but they couldn’t even travel between their islands without considerable armed support. Personal threat aimed at Kings and Caliphs was a way of ensuring that their powerful hosts left them alone. For the threat to work, it had to be demonstrated now and again.

  “Even Saladin went in constant fear of the Assassins, surrounding himself with loyal guards he personally knew. The Syrian branch of the Nizaris did make a couple of attempts on his life, wounding him once.

  “Overall, Nizari power and distribution of resources…”

  Abigail abruptly stopped herself. She was about to say, was much like that of the Crusading Orders. Maybe the Templars would have been left alone if they’d threatened to assassinate Phillip the Fair, or the Pope. But she didn’t want to lead Jack back to the Templars or indeed to the Hospitallers, not until she’d resolved the puzzles surrounding Guy and his Holy Water and his friendship with Sinaldin.

  “Yes?” queried Jack sharply. His eyes tried to enter her.

  “Aren’t you bored yet?” asked Abigail lamely. “There’s nothing for you here!”

  “What about the secrets? What were they hiding? This Gnostic stuff?”

  “Guarding,” emphasised Abigail. “Gnosticism is a big subject. The root of the word comes ultimately from the ancient Greek to know. Gnostics tend to think they know certain esoteric truths that are crucial to salvation. These are often linked to rejection of materialism, or a rejection of the standard rules and limits binding whichever religion spawned the Gnostic body. The ancient Nizaris completely abandoned Shari’ah law at times.

  “It’s possible,” she admitted, “that Safiyya’s poem is built on esoteric Ismaili truths. Anyhow, Gnosticism frequently goes hand in hand with dualism, the theory that there may be two aspects to God, even that one of these aspects is evil. Dualism also allows for the divine on Earth, for example in the person of an Imam.

  “I’ll grant you it’s mystic. And though there are a few million Ismailis around today, the Nizari line died out, so we may never know their deepest secrets.”

  “Maybe someone stumbled across those secrets, or reinvented the Assassins, or both,” mused Jack.

  “I guess that’s your department. But both Christian and Islamic mainstreams have usually viewed their respective Gnostic fringes as heretical, which is certainly the case for the Assassins. I think modern Islam would absolutely abhor the return of such a body and its sacrilegious mystique, quite apart from its unacceptable policy of violence. Neither would the Pope encourage a return of the Gnostic Cathars, who were thoroughly stamped out because of their challenge to orthodoxy, despite in this case their beliefs being closer to what real Christianity was originally supposed to be. So can we stay real here?”

  “You’re the one with your head stuck into poetry and oblivious to reality,” parried Jack calmly.

  Abigail glared. Jack returned a knowing smile.

  “To propose God has an evil side, is itself evil,” he said as though talking about the weather. “No true Christian group would do such a thing. And routes to God should be open, not obscured by mystic shrouds. Else the Devil may more easily twist the minds of an elite and so twist the path.”

  Abigail suppressed a mocking groan. Through religious indoctrination, this enforcer was someone’s pawn. But frustration welled up in her too, bursting acidly out.

  “Openness is indeed desirable. Do you think Islam a false route to God, then? A diversion of the Devil, as you put it?”

  Jack looked as though she’d slapped his face. His shoulders hunched, but his clear eyes regained their focus in only a second or so and continued to probe her. His flushed skin had returned to what she assumed was its normal pallor, yet still glistened with sweat. Short hair bristled and his jaw was thrust forward, a creature ready to strike, one that had slid from under a rock to prey on those in the sun.

  “It doesn’t matter what I think,” he answered casually. “I don’t let anything get in the way of the job. Tell me why you went to the mosque.”

  Abigail’s nerve-system plunged into cold shock. She gripped the edge of the table to stop her hands shaking. She suddenly felt she was looking at herself in a movie.

  “I… I thought you said you… you didn’t have me followed!”

  “I didn’t need to. We monitor everyone who visits the mosque.”

  Abigail’s shock transmuted to anger. Enormous fury. How could he abuse people’s rights that way. Her rights! She instinctively rose, knocking her chair over. She couldn’t remember ever being so angry. She felt her teeth grind. Her head pounded and a mist clouded her vision. She
wanted to punch Jack, wanted to tear those glassy eyes from his snooping fundamentalist face. He was ignorant and biased and unjustly empowered!

  “Dr. Leclaire.” Jack’s voice was subdued but steely. “Can a Nizari connection be confirmed? Is it in fact the case that your poem fragment reflects the secrets and survival of the Assassins of Alamut? What is the death that it speaks of?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she yelled, long past caring that this was not entirely true, at least for the first question.

  “This is a serious matter, Dr. Leclaire, not just an academic question of history.”

  “You’re fucking with history! And you want me to give you credibility. Well I won’t do that, I won’t!”

  Barely able to focus on the exit, Abigail left Jack to pay and stormed out, followed by the gaze of all the other customers.

  When she’d gone, looks of pity or sympathy shifted over to Jack. He was oblivious, already on the phone.

  “Yes, I am still digging up history,” he snapped. Then he breathed deeply as he forced a look of resigned patience upon into his features. Collecting himself, he lowered his voice.

  “No, I’m not just chasing her tail, attractive though it is. You’ll get to see a lot of it yourself. Yes. Stop whinging. This time, the plan is not to spook her, not to show yourself. We know where she runs to now. Yeah. Yeah, you can ditch the ridiculous scarf. Grey isn’t your colour anyhow. And don’t screw up. She’s on high alert, and very touchy. Not in that sense. More like a shapely knee in the groin.”

  And, reflected Jack, he’d told her something that maybe he shouldn’t have let slip. To get himself off a hook? Or to intimidate? Minor mistake, hopefully, even if it incensed her just now. What oh-so-clever Dr Leclaire needed was a bucket of cold water.

  Southern Ethiopia: July 1157

  Though weeks had passed, Arwe continued to survive obstinately. Strips of dark dried meat seemed woven around the knobbly-jointed poles of his limbs, the empty-looking bone barrel of his body and the full jug of his head – full of insights that Hakim desperately desired to possess.