Alhazred

by Donald Tyson

  “A token of my good faith,” he said in a mocking tone. “Here is the well you seek.”

  I stared around, trying to fix details of the moonlit landscape in my memory, but one hill looked like another, each stone like all other stones.

  “Where it is?” I cried. “How can I find it again?”

  “Don’t expect me to do everything for you without a price, Alhazred. Fulfill my purpose, and you will be led to this well.”

  “I will do as you say, lord,” I told him, my voice shaking with emotion.

  Beneath this humble pile of flat stones lay my face, my manhood, my only chance for happiness with the princess Narisa.

  A touch on my shoulder woke me. Martala leaned over me with sleep-narrowed eyes.

  “You cried aloud,” she murmured.

  “A dream, nothing more,” I said, my heart still hammering in my chest.

  The light before dawn illuminated the narrow chamber with gray. It was early, but since we both lay awake, we left the bed and relieved ourselves in the heavy copper pot that occupied the corner, then did our best to wash the sweat from our skin in the wooden basin with the clay pitcher of water and the single small towel on the washstand.

  When Baruch knocked on our door, we were both dressed in the new garments that had been left in our room the previous afternoon. They were unadorned white linen robes similar to his own that hung over our bodies almost to our feet. A belt of quilted linen drew them close at our waists and provided support for the sword and dagger worn by the girl. I remained unarmed, since a fool cannot be trusted with a weapon. White turbans wrapped our skulls. Our boots had been exchanged for shoes of soft leather that rose no higher than the bones of our ankles, and tied about our calves with two leather thongs after the manner of Roman sandals. I found this scholar’s uniform surprisingly comfortable.

  The rising ball of the morning sun painted a rectangle of cinnabar on the wall beside the open door. I squinted at it through our small window while the monk and the girl exchanged their blushing greetings behind my back. Like splashes of fresh blood, the sunlight caught the polished spiked helmets and gilded shoulder-guards of the armored sentries who paced the battlements between the towers, just finishing their final night watch. It spilled across the end of the lawn, and for a moment I had the fancy that each blade of grass had withered to the same rust-colored clay that composed the bricks of the walls.

  We were led into a great hall in the ground level of the dormitory, where hundreds of men milled around rows of long tables and matching benches. The hall was not wide, but was one of the longest chambers I had ever seen. Baruch showed us where to sit, at the end of the row nearest the entrance door, among the younger brothers. None were less than sixteen years or older than twenty. At the other end of the hall, where stood an elevated platform, the bearded elders sat at their tables. All brothers might be equal, I reflected, but not all were equally placed at meals.

  The food was simple, as might be expected for the early meal of the day, brown bread and a bowl of soup in which floated more vegetables and herbs than pieces of meat. I allowed Martala to feed me, after making an ineffectual attempt to guide the wooden spoon to my lips without aid. A few of the younger brothers shook their heads in sorrow. As we ate, one of the elder monks at the far end of the hall left his table and ascended to the platform, where he began to declaim a lesson in a booming voice that easily carried to my ears, for the monks all fell silent. It concerned the virtue of moderation in all things, and was delivered in Greek, the common tongue of the monastery.

  There was no division of the monks at the table by race, only by age. The beards began midway down the hall. Where I sat, the younger members of the order had smooth chins, but the further along I cast my eyes, the longer grew the beards. From their faces, more than half the monks appeared to be Persians. The next most numerous race were Greeks, and after that came a scattering of all peoples. There were a score or so of Egyptians, and even three men of black skin who may have been Nubians.

  Rumius sat at the head of one of the tables nearest to the platform. His features were difficult for me to interpret. In part he appeared Persian, but he had the nose and eyes of a Greek, of the type that dwells in the land of Macedonia. At one time his hair may have been golden. The historians say that the descendants of Alexander the Great were scattered across the eastern lands, even to fabled India. I wondered if their blood ran in the veins of this giant of a man, who more than any man I had ever met possessed an indefinable air of divinity.

  “In the mornings you will practice with the sword and bow, and exercise your body by running. Then, after your cleansing bath, you will join the other younger brothers in the lesson room, which is located in the lower level of the eastern wing of the library.”

  Martala stopped on the path and jerked me to a halt beside her with a tug on my rope. Baruch turned with a expression of inquiry. We had been on our way to the library, after finishing our meal.

  “I cannot bathe in the bath house,” she said.

  He smiled with reassurance.

  “It is our custom to bathe every morning after exercise. I know it seems strange to those who come from outside, but the water is not harmful. Those who say that bathing causes sickness are mistaken.”

  “It is not for myself, but for my brother, that I cannot bathe.”

  I glanced at her from the corner of my eye, wondering what story she would come up with that would excuse her from having to strip naked in the company of three score monks.

  “Does your poor brother fear the water?”

  “That is it, exactly,” she said with a bit too much emphasis. “Ever since the kick of the donkey, he has had an unnatural dread of water.”

  The monk gazed at me with wonder.

  “What you describe is a form of the disease the Greeks call hydrophobia, but I see no signs of this disease in your brother.”

  “It is not a sickness, only an irrational fear. Watch what happens when I say the word in my own tongue.” She spoke the word water in Coptic.

  I cried out and covered my head with my hands, staring around with wild eyes, then crouched to the ground as though fearful of being beaten. With soothing words and touches of her fingers, Martala induced me to stand and lower my arms to my sides.

  “You see? I must bathe my brother with my own hands, and it has become my custom to wash myself at the same time. This we can do using the wash basin in our room.”

  The monk was disappointed. He had looked forward to the sight of Martala’s nakedness. No doubt they washed each other in the bath house. It would give him the excuse to caress her skin. That he could never be permitted to do, or they would surely put us both to death. I expected him to argue that some other brother could bathe me, but this made so little sense that he held his tongue. We continued on our way toward the library.

  “I will show you the lesson room. In the afternoon, you will divide your efforts between copying texts in the scriptorium and manual labor in the workshop. We make all our common tools and furniture with our hands, and even weave our own linen and woolen cloths.”

  “I know how to use a loom. My cousin was a weaver.”

  He gave her a curious look.

  “An unlikely occupation for the member of a wealthy family.”

  “It was a diversion for him, nothing more,” she said without hesitation. “An eccentric amusement.”

  After viewing the lesson room, we mounted the marble staircase and continued onward to the third level of the library. The doors along the hallway were shut. A monk came out from one door carrying what appeared to be a collection of brass plates bound together at one edge by rings of wire. I realized that it was a book of some kind, but unlike any book I had ever seen. Over his shoulder I caught a glimpse of tables heaped with oddly shaped scroll cases and books, before he shut the door behind him. We
trailed after the silent shoes of this monk.

  “This is where we keep our most precious and dangerous texts,” he said to Martala. “They are in strange tongues, and are translated into Greek to make them more easily read, and to preserve them from decay. You need not concern yourself with this work. You will be assigned the task of copying the less sensitive of the reports that we receive from all across the world from various agents, so that they are gathered together in a single document for the study of our elders. Once you have passed your period of probation, you may be entrusted with more secret communications.”

  We followed the monk with the brass book through another small door, and I stopped in wonder, forgetting to play the fool as I gazed around with hungry eyes. Monks sat hunched over long slanted tables, writing on leaves of parchment. At their elbows rested an astonishing collection of books. The leather and wooden spines, bound with green brass or blackened silver, breathed a palpable odor of age. Some were not even books as we know them. I saw a monk copying text from a collection of ivory disks which he drew for the purpose from a leather pouch similar in shape to a money purse. Another transcribed from strips of bark, each as long as his forearm but no wider than three fingers. The characters written on the bark were like none that I had ever seen, nor were they known to the flesh of Nectanebus.

  This was the scriptorium of the Order of Sirius, where surely I would discover those secrets that so interested the dark man. Here, too, I might find the directions to the Well of the Seraph and the salvation of my second life.

  Chapter 46

  The following two months passed with surprising swiftness. In spite of the superficially changeless appearance of the monastery, it was a center of ceaseless activity that went on below the surface of the orderly round of day-to-day tasks. Monks were forever dispatched on mysterious errands, some dressed as scholars, other disguised to resemble merchants or mercenaries. There was an underlying sense of urgency to this clandestine work, like that of an army preparing for a great battle that pressed upon them.

  At the end of Martala’s period of probation, she was accepted into the Sons of Sirius with a simple yet dignified ceremony, in which she declared her order name to be Timonius and gave oath that she would willingly accept death should she by malice or error betray its secrets. Rumius presided over the ritual. I was permitted to attend, but my idiocy made me unfit for induction, and I kept my former false name. At the end, Rumius took Martala by the shoulders and kissed her on each cheek. Tears welled from poor Baruch’s brown eyes. It was a touching scene. I picked my nose-hole solemnly as I watched and sampled the taste of my finger, until one of the monks swatted me on the back of the head with his hand.

  For the first few weeks the monks set me to work cleaning the stables and emptying the chamber pots into the long communal outhouse behind the dormitory, where a constant flow of water from the overflow of the spring carried the wastes through an underground passage to the river. They were infinite in their patience, but eventually concluded that I did not possess the wits for such work. I had a distressing tendency to fling manure onto the backs of the horses in the stable, and splash piss down the staircase of the dormitory. To their surprise, I proved adept at the use of a broom, particularly when I was working in the library.

  I contrived to spend as much time as possible in the scriptorium, by feigning a simple pleasure in the books. The copyists became accustomed to the sound of my straw broom on the floorboards, and sometimes let me carry piles of books from their benches back to the central table, where they were sorted and filed away. All the books judged important enough to copy were kept on the third level of the library for the sake of convenience. This included strange books from far lands written in languages completely unknown to me. Some of these curious volumes did not appear shaped for the use of human hands.

  The acquisition of books was an unending expense for the order. Rumius paid fantastic sums for rare works on philosophy or magic, an eccentricity that was known from the headwaters to the mouth of the Tigris. Every day a few scrolls or bound sets of parchment were acquired in the marketplace from the boat masters, and when a dealer’s consignment arrived from Baghdad or some other city, the books were pushed through the little door in the gate piled high on wheelbarrows, like so many turnips.

  The brothers grew casual in their acceptance of me, and treated me as they would their own dim-witted kin, with rough kindness. They ignored my presence when they talked amongst themselves, and by leaning on my broom and listening I began to gather an understanding of the true work of the Order of Sirius. They believed themselves a defending army of light that would preserve humanity in a great war of destruction against the forces of darkness. For reasons unclear to me, they were convinced that this conflict was imminent. Hence their zeal to train their bodies and minds before the battle.

  Early in the third month, not many days after the new moon, I stood sweeping an open space of the floor of the scriptorium that was so clean, a white towel drawn across it would not have shown a shadow. The room was almost deserted. Most of the monks had descended for the evening meal in the dining hall. In the far corner three bearded monks stood talking, oblivious to my presence. I swept a little closer.

  “Rumius knows my opinion,” said one. “The weapon of lights will never be powerful enough to destroy the spawn of Cthulhu.”

  At the name of the Old One, my breath caught in my throat, but they were so intent on their topic they failed to notice the sound.

  “The last two experiments put the lie to your words,” said the youngest of them with indignation. “A combination of rays was found that burned the hide of that thing in the vault beneath our feet. Smoke arose from its body.”

  “Yes, but it healed in minutes. It was no more than an irritation to it.”

  “I stay far away from that thing,” the third said darkly. “My mind is not strong enough to resist it.”

  “No one’s mind is strong enough,” the elder of the three said. “That is why we take care to never go to it alone, but always in groups of three, so that if it seizes one of us the other two can restrain him. It can only control a single mind at a time.”

  “It should have been destroyed long ago. It is dangerous to keep it here.”

  “Dangerous, but necessary,” the younger monk said. “How can we combat an enemy we do not understand?”

  “I am not certain we could kill it even if we wished,” said the elder. “It has the power to reform itself, like the evil demon from which it came.”

  They left the scriptorium still in heated argument. I set the broom against a bench. This was what I had waited for. The times when the scriptorium emptied were few during the day, and it was not possible to visit it at night without risking discovery since all monks save those with special duties were expected to be within their rooms in the evening hours. Though no watch was set over the dormitory, a few elders always stayed in the library until dawn, studying by the light of lamps. I found the period of the evening meal the best occasion for private research. Attendance at the tables was flexible, but I had only a short time in which to work. Were I to fail to appear for my meal, someone would be sent to look for me.

  I went quickly to the cupboard that held the letters of correspondence from the covert agents in the hire of the order. They were in a dozen different languages, from all nations of the world, for the arms of the Sons of Sirius were long, and dispensed dinars the way a farmer scatters golden seed into the furrows of his plowed field. It was one of the tasks of the scribes to translate them into Greek and compile them for the study of Rumius and his senior advisors. They had served as my main source of information concerning the hidden activities of the order, for the monks seldom spoke of secret matters.

  I scanned through the documents, picking up a shred of information here, a fragment there, and filing them in my memory for future consideration. The order was particularly s
trong in Persia, as might be expected, but it also had many agents in Constantinople and Rome, and even in Damascus. One was an advisor to the Caliph, and stood ready to end his life on a word from Rumius. Similar sleeping assassins were placed in other palaces. Had Rumius wished, he could kill half the leaders of the civilized world with the stroke of a pen.

  A dirty scrap of papyrus caught my eye. It was from the agent in Yemen, placed within the palace at Sana’a, and was dated only two weeks ago. I smiled when I read the words in Arabic scrawled across its surface, and knew a moment of intense satisfaction:

  “Gracious Lord, the work you set me to do in your most recent communication has been accomplished. Let me be the first to inform you of the news that will soon travel throughout the world. King Huban of Sana’a is dead. While conducting his customary walking inspection of the grounds of his palace, he was struck upon the head by a loose tile that dislodged itself from a roof just as he passed beneath it. His personal guard immediately surrounded him and carried him into the throne room to the care of his physicians, but they could do nothing to prolong his life. A search was made of the building from which the tile fell, but it was found to be empty, and no sign of tampering with the roof was discovered. The following day, word of the king’s death having spread throughout the palace, the crown prince Yanni declared it an accident of fate and proclaimed himself the new ruler of the land, with the approval of his generals and advisors. His coronation ceremony passed without incident.

  “It is undoubtedly an act of divine wisdom that removes from this world so highly placed a worshipper of the Old Ones, for with the temporal power of the throne of Sana’a joined in common with their ancient evil, no wickedness would be beyond contemplation. Your promise of additional payment, made in the coda of your most recent letter, is unnecessary. The Order has been generous. I exist only to serve its holy purpose.”

  The message was unsigned to ensure the safety of the agent who wrote it, should it be intercepted, but bore a small symbol of identification in its lower corner. These symbols were recorded on a scroll, beside the names of the agents they identified. There were hundreds of them. When an agent ceased to report, his name was crossed out with a pen. New agents were added to the bottom of the scroll with their assigned symbols.