Alhazred

by Donald Tyson

  “Devotion in a son is admirable,” he murmured, watching me. “Yet when a father dies, the son must make his own way in the world.”

  “Your words are true.”

  Heaving a sigh of reluctance, I pretended to take from a pocket of my thawb the emerald, and set it before him. He gazed at it in silence for many heartbeats, and I realized that he had ceased to breathe. His fingers trembled slightly as he picked it up and studied it beneath his magnifier. The sunlight shining through it did not diminish the green within its depths. When he looked at me, his face held a pallor that was disquieting in a man of his years.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “As I explained, my father was a captain of a ship—”

  He made a sound of disgust and frowned, then turned back to the stone. It seemed to attract his gaze as polished amber draws a wisp of straw. He named a price in gold that was ten times his first offer. Ani beamed from ear to ear.

  “For this, and for the other three,” he added.

  “For the emerald alone,” I said.

  He frowned in thought. I made a motion of impatience, and he closed his fingers around the stone.

  “Agreed.”

  We left the shop with a small wooden strongbox that Ani carried on one shoulder as he limped along with the help of his stick.

  “We should hire an armed guard,” he said in a low voice. “This is a lot of gold.”

  “I trust you to safeguard it,” I told him.

  The expression on his face approached bliss. It was probably the first time anyone had ever said such a thing to him. Naturally it was a lie. I trusted that I could outrun him, with his crippled foot, but my trust extended no further than that. I am not by nature a trusting person.

  As we rounded a corner, I felt eyes upon my back and turned quickly. A man in a blue cloak, his head bowed so that I could not see his face beneath the band of his turban, stepped between two buildings into an alley. I walked quickly back to the mouth of the alley, my hand on the hilt of my sword, and peered around the edge of the wall. It opened at the far end into the adjoining street. I saw men and women walk past its exit, but no trace of the man in the blue cloak.

  Ani eyed me curiously when I returned but said nothing.

  We reached the Inn of the Stork without challenge. I had Ani carry the box up to my room, where the girl waited. Martala stared with delight at the golden gleam of the dinars in the open box, letting them run through her fingers, and expressed surprise that I had bargained so well in her absence. I said nothing, but I wondered if I had received even half of what the sea-green jewel was worth. The Greek had been too eager to acquire it. He had looked upon it with recognition, almost as though he knew its origin.

  In the afternoon we took the strongbox with the greater part of its gold to the house of the green door in the Lane of Scholars. The surplus of the gold hung heavy in my purse. A servant opened the door without speaking and escorted us into the hall. Theon waited in one of the rooms on the lower level beside a large man wearing a chain mail vest over his leather tunic, who I took to be his bodyguard, and a slender young scribe, who spread several parchments out on a large and highly polished table.

  The scribe counted the gold with efficient motions of his fingers and nodded to Theon, who closed the strongbox and gave it to the guard. I signed in the indicated places on the parchments, which were three in number—one for the anonymous owner of the house, another for me, and one for the civil bureaucracy of the Caliph, whose meticulous administrators kept filed away all exchanges of land or property within the city walls. The owner had placed his mark next to the signature of the agent.

  “It is a pity I could not meet your master face to face,” I murmured as I accepted one of the rolled parchments, held shut with a knotted red ribbon.

  “That is not possible,” Theon said, watching the scribe gather his pen and other implements into his portable writing desk, which he hugged to his shallow chest.

  “May I know the reason for your master’s shyness?”

  He looked at me without warmth.

  “No, you may not.”

  I accepted the keys without speaking, and watched the three leave my house. If its former owner wished to conceal his identity, it was of no concern to me.

  “Ignorant pig,” Martala said, her arms folded on her breast.

  “What can you expect from an infidel?” Ani said.

  We turned to look at him, and he nervously stepped from foot to foot as he leaned on his stick.

  “Go and ensure that linen has been spread on the beds in the two best rooms, and ask what the cook has prepared for the midday meal,” I told him.

  His grin of pleasure appeared genuine. He tapped his way from the room on his errands.

  “This will serve nicely for a library,” I told Martala, gazing at the blank walls of the chamber. There was ample space for book shelves and scroll racks.

  “Do you no longer wish me to sleep in your bed?” she asked in dejection.

  I turned to her with curiosity, surprised at the emotion in her words.

  “Don’t you want your own room, with your own bed?”

  “No.”

  I shrugged.

  “If you prefer to sleep on the floor at the side of my bed, it is of no concern to me. You will be sooner ready to help me dress in the mornings.”

  To my surprise, she nodded with a complacent look.

  “What about Ani? Do you mean to keep him?”

  “For the present. He knows Damascus and we do not.”

  “He will betray you,” she said with assurance.

  I thought she was probably correct, but did not give her the satisfaction of admitting it.

  The next three days were among the most pleasant I have ever experienced. I reacquainted myself with the luxury I had known in the palace at Sana’a, but with the difference that all of it was purchased with my own gold. This gave me a curious satisfaction. A similar sense of well-being arose from being a householder. True, the house at Alexandria had been mine by name, but I had not bought it, and had little enough time to get to know it. This was my house. I felt as though I belonged within its walls, beneath its roof. I drank the water of its well, and ate the food cooked on its kitchen fire.

  Every morning Ani and Martala went to the shops or the marketplace with several of the servants, and returned with cartloads of rugs, hangings, furniture, books, pots, and other necessary items. The previous owner must have endured a period of difficulty, for much of the furniture had been sold, and there were bare patches on the walls to show where paintings and tapestries had formerly hung. The silverware had been pawned, leaving only wooden and brass eating implements. The remaining ill-assorted plates were of wood or lead. Drinking cups of gold, silver, or crystal there were none. I wondered why the statues in the courtyard had not been sold, then reflected that it might be difficult to auction off the images of naked pagan goddesses in Damascus, the city most loyal in all the world to the strict injunctions of the Prophet.

  I was anxious to make the acquaintance of my neighbors, but this was not so easy to accomplish. They rarely ventured beyond their closed doors. Ani was of no use to introduce me to men of wealth and power. If this was a street of necromancers, there was nothing to reveal it. By day the houses appeared deserted, until their doors opened briefly to release a servant on some errand. These servants were dour of face and disinclined to speak to Martala. I could not address them in the street myself, since it was beneath my dignity as master of my house. As I had learned in my boyhood at Sana’a, such proprieties, foolish though they might seem, must be observed in society.

  The traffic on the street at night took on a more sinister aspect. Groups of hooded men wheeled small carts laden with tied linen bundles that were man-sized and reeked of the grave, or brought strange alchem
ical flasks and distilleries. Sometimes solitary messengers came and went on stealthy errands. It was obvious by their appearance and manner that they did not belong to the household staffs. Strange chemical scents floated past me on the breeze, and in the late stillness more than once I heard a faint shriek that could only be from the throat of some tormented creature.

  I saw all this on the third night as I walked the twisting Lane of Scholars after moonset, trying to get a sense of who lived behind the other doors. I had left Martala curled up and asleep under the silk sheet on my bed. As I had anticipated, her enthusiasm for sleeping on the floor waned after the second night, and I did not object when she slipped under the sheet beside me. The bed was large enough to sleep six. In any case, I had grown accustomed to having her soft snores in my ear.

  I returned back along the serpentine length of the street, keeping a discreet distance behind a two-wheeled cart pushed by a pair of laborers who muttered to each other as they tried to hold their awkward burden balanced over the wheels, yet prevent it sliding off into the street each time the cart tipped. My interest quickened when I saw that they intended to take it into the brown door of the house beside my own. Someone waited for their approach on the other side of the door. One of the men knocked lightly twice with the knuckle of his index finger, and the door immediately swung open on well-greased hinges. The cart disappeared and the door shut silently. Not a word had been spoken.

  Should I wait until the laborers emerged with their empty cart and question them about their business? Like as not, they would try to murder me and make me their next delivery. As I stood wondering what to do, I noticed a shadow move near the wall. The movement was slight. Most men would never have seen it. As I stared at the place, wondering if I had imagined the slide of darkness over darkness, the hood of a black cloak opened to reveal the face of a ghoul. His eyes studied me with keen attention.

  “You see me,” he said in the language of the ghouls. “How can such a thing be?”

  “Nothing so strange, that a ghoul should see a ghoul in the night,” I answered in the same tongue.

  The strangeness lay in the cloak he wore, and his presence here amid the houses of men. Ghouls preferred to go naked. They detested the rasp of clothing against their smooth dry skin, and could move more silently without its encumbrance. They seldom venture within the walls of a town, where the pairs of watching eyes were innumerable and the places of concealment few.

  His surprise at hearing me speak his own language was not so great as I expected. He approached me with care, emerging from the shadows as he drew nearer, and I smelled the carrion of his breath.

  “Why do you call yourself a ghoul?” he asked.

  His black fingernails gleamed as he flexed his large hands, and I saw that he was about to tear out my throat.

  “I am Alhazred of the Black Spring Clan,” I answered with haste. “Where we show courtesy to those of other clans who venture into our territory.”

  “Your clan is unknown to me.” He spoke without warmth, but withdrew his hands beneath his cloak. “This is not my territory.”

  “What are you called, and where do you dwell?”

  “My name is Uto, of the White Skull Clan. We dwell beyond the walls of this city in one of its burial places.”

  “You have business with a necromancer of this street,” I said, divining his purpose.

  “That is no concern of yours, Alhazred of the Black Spring Clan.”

  “It may be in future.” I gestured at the green door, only a dozen paces further along the street. “That is my house.”

  “Ah! So you are the necromancer who bought old Hapla’s house. I thought your name sounded familiar. You are the latest gossip of the city.”

  “What do they say about me?”

  “Merely that you possess jewels of great rarity, and that you purchased Hapla’s house outright with a chest of gold. You are presumed to be fabulously wealthy.”

  “How is it known that I am a necromancer?”

  The ghoul’s shoulders shook, and he made the rasping noise that is laughter for his kind.

  “Everyone who lives in the Lane of Scholars is a necromancer. Surely you knew that before you bought the house?”

  “I was told something to that effect,” I admitted. “What do you know of the previous owner of my house?”

  Uto shrugged beneath his cloak.

  “Little enough. I had no dealings with him. He was said to be wrapped up in the magic of portals, a very deep study of many years.”

  “He must have been successful, for he is gone.”

  Again the ghoul laughed.

  “For a human, you have a good sense of humor,” he said, his sharpened teeth projecting over his lower lip. “I almost like you.”

  “If Hapla did not vanish into one of his portals, what caused him to sell his house?”

  Uto scowled.

  “As I heard the tale, he was given a choice by the Caliph Yazid. Either to leave the city or be arrested and executed.”

  “What has the Caliph against necromancers?”

  “He is afraid of your kind. If it lay within his power, he would have his guards break down all these doors, kill you while you slept, and burn your houses to the ground. He may yet do so, on one of these dark nights. As it is, he moves against those individuals who draw his displeasure. Last month it was Hapla. Next month it may be you.”

  “Who dwells there?” I asked, gesturing toward the brown door.

  “There lives the greatest of you, or so the gossip says. It was with him that I had business.”

  Before we could speak further, the brown door opened to emit the cart, empty of its linen-bound burden. The laborers pushed it back along the street, and the ghoul floated like a shadow behind them, unseen by the two men, who did not notice my presence in the shadows. It was evident that Uto had only been there to ensure the safe delivery of the corpse, for such it surely must be. I wondered what use the inhabitant of the house beyond the brown door would have for such an object.

  My encounter with the ghoul occupied my thoughts the following day, but I found nothing in his discourse to turn to my advantage, other than to remind myself that it would be foolish to annoy the Caliph Yazid, and this I had always known. He was said to be quite mad, and to spend all his time in a drunken stupor amid his concubines and eunuchs, playing on the flute and composing love songs. If this was so, there was little to worry about, but I reflected that even a drunkard became sober from time to time.

  Martala occupied herself with Ani and the household staff, seeing to the display of her latest purchases for the house. I sat at a table beneath a shade tree in my garden, reading the scroll of the Old Ones and trying to understand some of the more obscure points of grammar in their difficult language, which was several times more complex than any language spoken by men. In truth, it was a human language, since the primal tongue of the Old Ones could not have been comprehended by the human brain, but it was a human language that most closely conveyed the essence and potency of their true tongue. It had not been created by men, but by the Old Ones themselves for the use of their slaves.

  A babble of childish laughter drifted over the wall at my back. It seemed an incongruous sound to emanate from the same house that had received a wrapped corpse on the night before, but my thoughts were elsewhere and I paid it scant attention as I formed the arcane words and sounded out their Greek letters. My mind was drawn back to itself by the impact of a leather ball upon the surface of the table. The ball was not solid, but a bladder filled with air. It bounced twice on the grass and came to rest at the base of a tree.

  “Father, my ball! I lost my ball!” a child’s voice cried out in Arabic from the other side of the wall.

  “Lost it?” a man’s voice said in good humor. “It was here a moment ago. How can it be lost?”

 
“Perhaps I can supply the answer,” I called out.

  There was silence from the other side of the barrier. I stood and picked up the ball.

  “What was reduced to nothing can be made to reform itself,” I said, and tossed the leather sphere into the other garden, which I could not see, for the wall was much higher than my head.

  “Indeed it can,” said the man’s voice. “May I ask the name of the one who has performed this miracle for my daughter?”

  “I am Alhazred, late of Yemen, but now a resident of Damascus.”

  “A fortuitous acquaintance, Alhazred. The girl would have shed tears all afternoon without your intervention.”

  His voice was cultured and deep, that of a scholar and teacher. The child giggled. By the sound, she could not have been older than five or six.

  “I am known in this city as Harkanos,” the voice continued. “And I am indebted to you. Will you come to my garden and share wine with me?”

  “With the greatest delight.”

  A servant ushered me from the street through the brown door into a courtyard that was similar in size to my own, but lacked the adornment of Greek goddesses. Waiting for me at the foot of the front steps was a man some twenty years my senior, who wore a dark green robe of shimmering silk decorated at its collar, hem and cuffs with double strips of cloth of gold. At the open throat of the robe over his plain white undershirt hung a silver medallion of curious design, in the shape of a crescent moon with the two horns turned downward. From the point of each horn dangled a seed pearl. His brown hair was cut short to reveal his ears, and curled over his broad forehead. Like me, he went with his head uncovered and his chin shaven. He smiled, showing even white teeth.

  “I have been wishing to become acquainted with my new neighbor,” he said, studying my englamoured face with warm interest.

  “As have I.”

  “So Uto told me.” He saw my look of surprise. “He returned to me after you left the street and related your conversation with him.”

  His clear gray eyes held only frankness and a mild amusement.