Assassins - Ian Watson & Andy West

by Ian Watson

  Hakim’s molar sometimes ached badly these days, sabotaging clear thought. To find relief and to further explore Arwe’s medical technique, he’d asked the Priest-Witch about remedies for toothache. Arwe peered and felt inside Hakim’s mouth, then announced by way of Yaqob, “The tooth must leave your mouth at once, or poison will damage the jaw. Also the coming rites would be spoiled, the spirits shunning you because of this malady.”

  The purpose of the impending ceremony was to honour and induct Hakim in some way; apparently a ‘monkey-spirit’ ritual enacted by firelight, which it seemed he must experience in order to be primed for further progress. A cow would be slaughtered and the whole village would feast, though so far Arwe had been oddly reluctant to pick or reveal the exact day this would take place.

  “I will remove the offending tooth right now,” continued Yaqob as the voice of Arwe, “and we’ll enact the rites afterwards, this very evening.”

  “But Hakim,” whispered Sadiq, “I can do that. Why didn’t you say it was so bad?”

  “I will take the tooth out,” repeated Arwe firmly. He must have understood Sadiq’s tone and expression, if not the Arabic words.

  Hakim frowned. Why hadn’t he told Sadiq about his problem? Because he wished to seem impeccable?

  “Sadiq, now that the old man has offered, I can’t risk offending him.”

  “If only we’d brought extraction forceps with us. Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi’s design, of course.”

  Yes, reflected Hakim, as pioneered in Córdoba by the great physician and described in his masterful thirty-volume encyclopaedia, published by Abu al-Qasim fifty years ago. Al-Zahrawi’s name and reputation would surely process down the centuries. With a sudden thrill Hakim realised that, by the end of times, his own reputation might well soar above those of all other physicians!

  He came back down to earth. Hindsight was wonderful. An abscess indeed. He’d feared as much. Now he’d be punished for not taking enough heed. His own health was a priority, so that God’s work would not be hindered.

  Arwe clapped his hands and gave incomprehensible orders in the local language.

  First, Guba brought a small gourd, from which Arwe poured a measure of brown liquid into a bowl, which he gave Hakim to drink. The taste was sharp like quince, yet spicy too. Soon Hakim’s head was swimming and he had to lie back, only foggily aware of what Guba was now holding out for Arwe. A knife, yes, a blade. And wooden tools. A chisel of wood? A mallet? The objects wavered before Hakim and he couldn’t be sure. He wanted to ask, but his jaw had become huge and paralysed.

  Experimentally, he moved his legs, only to discover that his limbs were tiny and feeble, his torso too, compared with his vast yet vague head. Of course his face must enlarge enormously, to make it easier for Arwe to enter! By now his head was so large that his senses and sensations were much diluted. In fact the hut was his mouth, in which Arwe and Guba and Sadiq all crouched. Then no, the hut wasn’t really a hut at all. It was a great tent pitched in the desert. Someone was banging on a tent peg within the tent that was Hakim.

  Blood ran down Hakim’s chin, leaking past lips that seemed to be the size of bananas. As his tongue probed a soft emptiness, metallic-tasting blood oozed throughout his numbed mouth. He spat red saliva like a sticky sauce onto his palm, perceiving with a professional eye that clotting would soon start, as already there was a slight thickening. He wondered if the Priest-Witch had smeared something into the wound that would help.

  Full awareness returned. His head and upper back were raised by some uncomfortable support. Arwe and Guba hunched over the dirt floor, from which they’d pulled back the matting. Guba dug a hole with the knife, then Arwe pushed something inside, after which earth and matting were both replaced.

  “They just buried your molar,” Sadiq informed him. “Or rather what pieces are left of it, wrapped in a leaf. How do you feel?”

  Hakim struggled to sit upright. Sadiq’s arm helped him, then held him as the world swam, before suddenly stabilising. He could feel blood in his throat! Not to worry, the flow would soon cease. More delicate probing revealed that the edge of the hole amid his molars was loose, a flap.

  “First they cut your gum,” Sadiq commented. “And then…”

  “Later, later.” Burying the extracted tooth must be a rite of witchcraft, presumably benevolent, perhaps to assist healing? Or maybe Arwe simply liked to keep trophies under his floor. Alternatively, the Priest-Witch didn’t wish such things to fall into the wrong hands, if to Arwe’s mind possession of part of a living person conveyed some power over that same person. Clearly he didn’t intend to exercise any such power malignly, since he hadn’t tried to hide where he was putting the fragments of demolished molar.

  Ah, Hakim told himself, I can think fully again, without constant interruption by that incessant, nagging ache. He spat once more. Arwe shuffled closer, still on his knees, and sniffed at him. Satisfied, the Priest-Witch hummed tunelessly, nodding to himself. Guba provided leaves for wiping oneself and spitting into if necessary.

  A few hours later, flickering flames roasted the joints and ribs of a skinny cow. Tumultuous villagers danced and sang until sweat sheened their bodies. The moon was full and bright. By its silver light, older women were scraping the hide of the slaughtered animal, rendering offal that couldn’t be eaten into tallow, boiling out some dye from the gall bladder, slicing meat for drying. Hakim’s gum and accompanying hole still leaked blood occasionally, but his remaining discomfort was much less than that persistent jinnee of a toothache.

  Arwe sat in his black throne, on supports to raise him up. Goggle-eyed Guba stood proudly by Arwe’s side like a vizier, or a hybrid of medical orderly and pagan acolyte, since he held a knife and an inverted monkey skull doing duty as bowl. Hakim, Sadiq, and Yaqob sat cross-legged to Arwe’s left as the old man swayed and chanted, eyes rolled upward.

  At a shout from nearby, dancing and singing abruptly ceased. The villagers, perhaps two hundred in all, gathered around the Priest-Witch and his guests, craning to get the best view.

  Then two young men, bodies and faces daubed ghostlike with white pigment, came rushing through, bearing the struggling figure of a small child… no, it was leaner and longer-limbed, not quite human. A demon, declared Hakim’s shocked thought. No, it was a monkey, its fur made hoary by the moonlight. A muzzle was tied over its mouth.

  The ghost-men knelt before the black throne, holding out the panicking monkey by its stretched arms. The animal jerked impotently and its feet scrabbled for purchase. Arwe made gestures and soothing noises, which seemed to calm the animal somewhat. Still it darted fearful glances at the circle of spectators, at the nearby tongue-tips of flame and bat-wings of smoke.

  Guba passed the knife to his master and crouched forward, carefully positioning the bone bowl. Arwe bent and slipped the blade under the monkey’s neck, raising its chin so that their sight met. His human eyes engaged the animal’s gleaming eyes that did not know what a knife was or what it could do.

  Arwe intoned what might be a prayer.

  “What does he say?” whispered Sadiq to Yaqob.

  “I don’t understand,” was the reply.

  Suddenly Arwe slashed, and Guba was catching blood that poured from the monkey’s severed throat as it convulsed.

  Ululating, the ghost-men bore the dying animal away to hurl its body onto the bonfire to complete its death. Guba thrust the bowl at Hakim. He took this gift without hesitation and raised it to his lips. It couldn’t be so bad; after all, the taste of blood was already in his mouth! Having swallowed half of the warm contents, he offered the bowl to Arwe, but the Priest-Witch gestured Hakim to drain it dry. At which the crowd leapt up and down, yelling encouragement. He finished drinking and wiped his lips.

  “Translate this carefully, Yaqob. You honour me, great Priest. Am I now a blood-brother of those who worship monkeys?”

  The exact reply eluded the translator. “He says something about monkey and spirit within you and protect. But many of
the words aren’t Oromiffa, or maybe I never heard them before.”

  “Ask him to repeat what he said more simply.”

  Elusive as ever, Arwe called instead for meat, which came quickly, chopped up and served on banana leaves as plates. First the old man sucked the juices from chunks in his toothless mouth, then with a slobbery kiss he transferred these to a serviceable young woman with prominent breasts, for her to masticate more before returning them to Arwe lip-to-lip to swallow.

  Southern Ethiopia: September 1157

  All of Hakim’s expertise, and Arwe’s redoubtable will-power and witchcraft, were unable to delay the inevitable. The old man was simply far too old, his organs worn out, although the Priest-Witch’s mind was still mischievous enough to keep Hakim in suspense until almost the last moment. He, Hakim, God’s chosen vessel for the secrets of blood and plague, was reduced to begging for more clues, was nearly reduced to despair.

  Until just before the last, death-bed moment.

  Then, finally, praise be to God the Merciful who had heeded his prayer, the pagan gasped out long-guarded knowledge. Yaqob’s whispered translation was, “Good monkey-spirit… can protect… from plague. Rare monkey-spirit…”

  “How do I know which is a good monkey?” Hakim implored, on his knees by the old man’s head.

  “Look… for monkey… old before its time.” So saying, Arwe cackled, the sound diminishing into his death-rattle.

  A monkey old before its time? Arwe had left him a teasing legacy.

  Guba kept a night-long vigil beside his former master’s corpse, banging loudly on a gourd-drum to begin with, then less noisily until finally towards dawn he was merely tapping intermittently, as if echoing the departure of Arwe’s spirit into a far distance which finally became immeasurable.

  After sunrise, wearing a monkey skin draped over his head and down his back, grizzled by the dust of mourning thrown over it by young women, Guba led an ululating procession to the river. Laid upon a reed mat and partly covered by Guba’s monkey-cape, the corpse was launched out upon sluggish water, to be torn apart soon enough by contending crocodiles. Thus no trace nor trophy of Arwe would remain, which might be misused or abused.

  And so began goggle-eyed Guba’s reign. Hakim persuaded the younger successor to

  sample, much diluted with water, the violet liquid derived from seaweed. This medicine soon calmed Guba’s restlessness, his rapid heartbeat, his tremors of the fingers and sweating, both relieving these afflictions and lending Guba greater dignity. An alliance with Hakim resulted, which saw the village embark upon new practises regarding captive monkeys, the better to honour the monkey-spirits, of course.

  Many more monkeys should be captured, Hakim cunningly advised. For the more monkeys, the greater the spirit of the village! Was this not so?

  Indeed it was. Inhabitants of other villages sharing the same language and beliefs began to visit, led by their own lesser priest-witches, paying homage and bringing lavish gifts of food. The growing size and complexity of the monkey shrine was making Guba’s village a little Mecca for the pagans. And it seemed too that Arwe’s redoubtable reputation now attached itself to Guba, yet without the dread which the old man had also inspired.

  Monkeys with weeping eyes, monkeys that sneezed and coughed, were segregated to breed, for Hakim sought to concentrate those evil spirits that Arwe had said seeded plague, or rather, as Hakim thought to himself, concentrate the bad humours in such monkeys. Surely their offspring would also sneeze and cough and have watery eyes, thus providing him with a pure and predictable supply of animals to experiment with.

  Yet, except for one isolated instance, this was not so.

  “Why not, why not?” Hakim demanded of Sadiq in vain.

  “You’re beyond me in most of your thinking,” confessed Sadiq.

  In one matter, Guba followed Arwe’s canny precedent. The catching of monkeys was a strictly religious matter, so Hakim should not witness nor learn the actual method. Yet in all other regards, there was the fullest co-operation.

  As soon as Hakim gained Guba’s complete confidence, naturally he asked about ‘monkeys old before their time’, only to discover to his chagrin that the skin sported by Guba for Arwe’s funeral had come from just such a monkey, hairs grizzled while not even fully grown. Due to how dusty the fur had been on account of the funeral rites, Hakim had seen, yet did not see at all! As Arwe had no doubt envisioned, when he cackled his last. That precious skin, which Hakim could have studied, was squandered as food for crocodiles.

  And then a realisation stunned him. The young monkey whose blood Arwe gave him to drink during the pagan ceremony… in the moonlight its fur had been hoary! Silver though the moonlight was, moonlight alone was not enough to transform the usual brown coat of these creatures!

  Had Arwe somehow conferred on him protection against plague? Or at least given what Arwe believed to be protection. Was that what his mysterious words after the ceremony meant? Why was that done with blood? Realisation became a thrill, a cautious belief, or at least almost a belief. Had the pagan Arwe truly been God’s tool? Was he, Hakim, now properly armed for God’s ultimate work?

  Sadiq was certainly not protected, however, nor Yaqob. Hakim decided it would serve no useful purpose to alert his colleagues to this. He would have to be cautious about his speculations, yet he couldn’t resist some discussion, some revelation about the ideas that were bursting up inside him, as though al-Khidr the Intercessor himself was calling forth a fountain of knowledge in his head.

  “So,” said Hakim to Sadiq, “according to our departed Priest-Witch, a youngish monkey with grey fur may give protection against plague. Because, I deem, that monkey itself is already protected.”

  “Obviously not by a jinnee!”

  “Quite so. Protected by a substance which must surely be in the monkey’s blood. For blood is the plentiful river of the body, which circles around and around, pumped by the heart.”

  “Pumped?”

  “Galen’s views are plainly wrong. The blood certainly lies still after death, but not before. How else can blood gush from a wound, unless it is being pumped? Air does not displace this blood.”

  “You should write a treatise about this!”

  “I must leave that to some other physician. God has appointed me to study plague and to make of plague His scimitar.”

  “There does exist another river. Or rather stream. I refer to urine.”

  “Oh Sadiq, if a substance protects, would it regularly be pissed out?”

  “But how can that which protects make the monkey die young?”

  “The monkey looks old before its time. The cure must carry some cost, some chronic ailment perhaps. Yet not necessarily a fatal cost.”

  To Hakim’s great frustration, younger monkeys with greying hair were not yet among those captured.

  Southern Ethiopia: March 1158

  The tribe an hour to the west had become jealous of Guba’s prospering community. Raids on cattle began. When warriors from Guba’s village retaliated, lives were lost on both sides, provoking further bloodshed.

  “The Igwe are scum,” Guba informed Hakim. “They worship hyenas and eat their shit. Their women don’t know who sires their babies. They hate everyone.”

  Hakim wondered whether this assessment was quite accurate, and what the Igwe opinion might be of Guba’s people.

  “Instead of killing Igwe warriors,” Hakim suggested, “maybe they can be captured and brought back here alive.”

  “For torture?” asked Guba.

  “Not exactly… but yes, to die horrible deaths. The monkey-spirits we venerate should be allowed to exact their vengeance upon the vile Igwe, and this I believe they will do, in the most terrible manner.”

  Guba eagerly agreed.

  At last, thought Hakim, he would be able to experiment upon men; he could have them drink the blood of weeping monkeys. And may God be merciful to them, although they were pagans, for their awful suffering would be to His glory! Hakim had t
hought the theory through and through. He was confident now that the blood of weeping monkeys would seed plague, whereas the blood of prematurely aged monkeys conferred protection from the very same affliction.

  And so it was that three Igwe youths were soon held captive in a newly built cage of strong bamboo, adjoining the monkey cages. They were daily objects of mockery for Guba’s people, although not targets for physical abuse. Hakim bled a weeping monkey, and by threat of burnings, conveyed enthusiastically by a villager who spoke Igwe, he compelled the three youths to drink cups of blood, with the direst consequence for any one of them who spilled so much as a single drop. Then Hakim waited patiently, inspecting the prisoners three times a day in case the guard failed to notice the earliest signs. Yet a whole month and more went by, without any of the youths developing tokens of plague. Too long!

  Hakim doubted both himself and Arwe’s knowledge, so tenuously passed on. He sought inspiration in prayer, and questioned himself. What if the seed of plague wasn’t in the blood, after all? Loath as he was to sacrifice a captive monkey, he ordered one animal to be killed, then with Sadiq’s assistance dissected it. Again by threat of torments, he compelled one of the Igwe to eat its raw brains, a second the heart, a third the liver. He watched those youths for several hours afterwards, in case they vomited, involuntarily or deliberately.

  And he waited again, day after day, week after week, to no avail.

  With blades of dry grass, Hakim swabbed the tears from a weeping monkey that was restrained by villagers, then compelled the prisoners to lick the swabs. Still no success.

  Increasingly, Guba had been grumbling at the failure of the Igwe prisoners to succumb to the promised fatal torments. It wasn’t that Guba didn’t respect Hakim’s peculiar approach to bodily matters, not after the success of the violet liquid. However, Guba had his own status to sustain. So finally stern justice must be meted out to the Igwe trio, the sterner in view of all the delay.