The Bones of the Old Ones (Dabir and Asim)

by Howard Andrew Jones

  Even after Lydia ceased movement, Dabir held her still, absently brushing her hair. It was only when he laid her down and closed her eyes that a vapor formed before us and Lamashtu appeared in its midst. She took longer to appear than she ever had before, perhaps because she was weakened.

  I stood, shielding Najya with my body. I had no sword to draw, only a knife, so I put my good hand to it.

  “You have come too late,” Dabir said, rising. “She has died.”

  Lamashtu’s eyes were bloodshot, her eyes white and staring. She strode forward and stared down at the Greek woman’s body. “Who now will return my favor?”

  “Do not look to her,” Dabir said. His eyes shone with tears. “For she has surely passed on to paradise.”

  “You were her companions. You profited from her actions. The debt falls naturally to you.”

  “You made no bargain with us,” Dabir said tiredly. “Your magic has no hold upon our blood.”

  Her mouth twisted in rage. “I should slay you for your insolence!”

  “You bargained, and lost. But we have lost as well, for she was our friend.”

  She sneered. “I will remember you.” She looked then to the still body, and extended a hand to it, and Lydia’s corpse vanished in a burst of smoke. Najya gasped and Dabir’s eyes widened in shock.

  “I may yet have use for her,” Lamashtu said with a mocking smile, and she disappeared as well.

  There was no consoling Dabir then, and I sorrowed both for him and for Lydia. It was a bad end that had come to her, but a valiant one. I was to pray many times that she had escaped whatever Lamashtu planned.

  We had no way to travel after that. Lydia’s carpet had carried her to the Khazar camp and it likely remained there. The bull was destroyed, and the Khazar horses were long departed. No food was left us, and we had only the clothes upon our backs. Both spear and staff were drained of energy and dessicated, even had we known how to wield the latter. We would surely have starved and frozen if a caravan had not chanced upon us that evening. We did not try to explain ourselves, and I cannot be sure they would have given aid if Dabir and I had not shown our medallions.

  By the time we reached Mosul a day later, the snow was melting. Spring came early that year, and before very long the trees leafed out and the birds sang in their branches. It was most welcome, and more wondrous than ever after the winter we’d suffered.

  Upon our return, Najya was hosted by the governor. I healed well, and swiftly, for I was a strong man, and still relatively young. Even before my pains had subsided I was in fine enough shape to tell the governor all that had transpired on our journey, and so it was that I was there on hand to see Abdul and the rest of the men return to the city. He had been wounded by Anzu, but Kharouf had doubled back for him. They, too, had a tale to tell, of combat with a great dragon of snow. They had fashioned torches to fight the thing, and all but three had come through alive, though Ishaq had been frozen near to death in the monster’s coiling tail. It gladdened my heart to see them, and the governor gifted them with many fine garments and other honors. It may be that you have heard the song Abdul’s cousin wrote of the affair, for it is still popular in the north today.

  The wooden horse was placed on the ledge above our curio shelf, as we both thought fitting. It sat there for long years as we accumulated other mementos. I have it with me now, as I write this in the tower. The bull, alas, had vanished in the flood, its magic spent, along with any fragments of the club of Herakles, which I would much rather have retained. We had thought also to bury Erragal’s remains, but never found them.

  The caliph shortly received word of the whole affair and commanded us to report to Baghdad so that he might hear all of the details in person. Being the just and noble ruler that he was, though, he gave us a deferral, that I might address important matters in Isfahan, which I shall now relate.

  After a few days of rest I called upon Najya at the governor’s residence. Things were much more formal and proper there at the palace with the crisis passed, with handmaidens waiting just beyond the curtains.

  My first marriage had been arranged by my parents, which had been well and good, and my second through my second wife’s mother, so I had never before directly broached marriage with the woman I hoped to wed. I had faced down all manner of horrors in the preceding days, yet I found I must summon a greater form of courage as I sat down beside her. She looked very lovely that day, dressed as she was in white and blue, her hair lustrous and well brushed. As she fixed those wondrous eyes upon me I lost most sense of what I had planned to say.

  “I have been looking forward to riding with you in Isfahan,” I managed finally, “and seeing these flowers you spoke of.”

  “That would be very nice,” she replied, then watched expectantly.

  I cleared my throat. “I was wondering if you would prefer to ride with me, as I am, or if you would rather I be a married man, first. To you, I mean.”

  Ah, she was merciless, and she insisted later that she found my discomfort charming. All innocently she blinked and said, “I am not sure I follow what you mean.”

  “I am asking,” I said, “whether you would, ah, want to be married to me.”

  Still she waited, so that I struggled on to fill the silence. I did not want her thinking that I meant to go against the wisdom of the Holy Koran and form a secret agreement between us. “Naturally I will call upon your family in Isfahan, and speak with them. And…” I thought to assure her I would move her things to Mosul, then worried she wouldn’t be happy to live so far from home, then remembered her family might not want her taken so far away. “But … if you say nay, I shall not trouble them,” I finished lamely.

  She waited only a moment more before finally taking pity upon me. “I shall say yes,” she told me. “Yes, a hundred times would I say it.” She raised her hand to my cheek and I swear that moment was like being kissed for the very first time. And great happiness did I know.

  By the time Dabir and I and Najya—and her female chaperones (for this was a trip planned with all propriety, rather than expediency)—reached Isfahan, our fame had resided there awhile, though it bore only a strained resemblance to the truth. Some folk had already heard of our adventure in the Desert of Souls and the saving of Baghdad, and now their eyes goggled at the sight of us, for the tale of Dabir’s monster slaying had reached them over the caravan trails. I, too, was not unknown, and Najya’s brother and family met me warmly.

  Spring was in full bloom by the time of our wedding feast, surely among the most splendid that I ever attended, and unquestionably the most lively, for there were storytellers and acrobats, and fine drummers and other such things, and all folk who were there, even those who came troubled, were seen to be smiling and laughing. The caliph gifted us with a tremendous chest of treasure, and Jaffar sent up a great bundle of beautiful cloths and a pair of very fine white horses. Seats of honor went to Dabir, of course, and also to Rami, who had never traveled farther than the fields of Mosul before. He beamed as though he had been appointed caliph for a day. Mosul’s governor also was there, with many fine gifts, and Shabouh, and Abdul, and Ishaq and the other soldiers who’d escorted us to Harran and proudly guarded us on the journey to and from Mosul. And Buthayna came. She kept her distance from all the richly arrayed folk, though she found time to bake a heavenly selection of sweet cakes.

  The celebration went on for three days, and I handed out nearly as many fine presents as those given to my wife and me. Dabir presented a copy of the Iliad to me, one illuminated as grandly as a fine Koran. When I reminded him he had lost the bet, he only laughed and said that he hoped I would read it anyway. I did, eventually, and discovered that the story had many splendid moments, even if its end was abrupt.

  But among all the presents was one most puzzling, for a long caravan arrived as we were dining on the second day and there was some confusion, for everyone thought it a grand gift for my bride and me. Instead it proved to be an allotment of scrolls and stone tablet
s that the caravan master delivered to Dabir, along with a single short letter initialed only with an A:

  I have removed most of the contents of Erragal’s library, for it is no longer secure, but I thought you might enjoy these selections. Perhaps you will accept them as some small token of apology.

  I thought Dabir would be better pleased to have such a gift, yet he frowned. “If Anzu means to make a project of me, he shall be disappointed.” He ended up turning the entire collection over to his favorite institution of the north, the library of Iskander, in Mosul, though you should not think he kept from reading the texts. He also sent most of his own half of the treasures bestowed upon him by the governor and the caliph—a great deal of which had been recovered from the Khazar camp—on to the family of Jibril, whose body the governor went to great pains to recover and inter with honors.

  But let me speak again now of Najya, who became so natural a part of my life that it swiftly grew difficult to recall how I had managed without her. Long were we together, and almost always did we find happiness in each other’s arms, for we were better matched than most couples. While she never again demonstrated any sign of Usarshra’s presence, I never doubted that a strong spark of something mystical remained within her. But then all wise men know their women are touched with magic.

  These were not the end of my adventures with Dabir, of course. I am sorely tempted to speak on about our summons to Baghdad, and the curious sword gifted to me there by Jaffar, and the whole black plot that swept up Sabirah’s husband upon our arrival, but I shall save that for another time, for this tale is done.

  Afterword

  Many times I’ve said that my chief source of inspiration rises from the adventure stories that have thrilled me since I first began reading, most especially the tales of Harold Lamb, Robert E. Howard, and Leigh Brackett, although my wife will tell you it was Roger Zelazny I was trying hardest to imitate for many years. I loved his splendid imagination and plot twists and his flawed, opinionated narrators, particularly Corwin of Amber. I probably read Zelazny’s first Amber series more times than any other books in my youth, with the possible exception of Harold Lamb’s The Curved Saber and Fritz Leiber’s Swords Against Death, which was the first sword-and-sorcery collection I ever laid hands on, and by sheer luck contains the most solid run of the adventures of the great rogues, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Swords Against Death did not, however, print the map I saw in another book of the pair’s adventures. On that map, among all the glorious place names that dripped storytelling promise was a worn-down mountain range far to the north named the Bones of the Old Ones. I don’t recall Fafhrd or the Mouser ever spending much time there, and I always wanted to know more about the region. The bones in this book ended up being very different from Leiber’s mountains, but they would not have existed at all if I had not spent long moments savoring that map.

  That the stories of Herakles were leftovers from Stone Age legends is no theory of mine, but of the undeservedly neglected speculative fiction writer Manly Wade Wellman. Wellman is better known today for his stories of John—sometimes referred to as Silver John—who wanders the Appalachians with his silver-stringed guitar fighting creatures man was not meant to know, but Wellman based an early cycle of pulp stories around a neolithic hero, Hok, whom he intended as the man whose exploits had been misremembered as the adventures of the Greek hero. The tomb found by Dabir and Asim is not meant to be Hok’s, but the prehistoric Herakles in this book was inspired by Wellman’s musings. The look of the tomb itself is loosely based on the prehistoric hilltop ruins in southern Anatolia known as Göbekli Tepe, which form the oldest known religious structure in the history of mankind.

  The Herakles stories were not the only myth cycle I plundered for this tale. Legends with groups of seven are to be found all over the ancient Middle East. There were indeed stories of a group known as the Sebetti, though so far as I have been able to learn they were more like an anthropomorphic depiction of destructive forces of nature than individuals. There were also legends of seven sages, led by Adapa, who refused an elixir of immortality. I saw no reason not to combine these and other bits of ancient mythology, including the names of some gods, heroes, and monsters, to ground incidents more firmly in the setting, although I freely invented other pieces and sewed it all together into what hopefully feels like one cloth. As to pure fantasy, the Khazars did not have a doomsday cult that welcomed the world’s end in ice. In the eighth century, the Khazars were a large nomadic group, and both men and women were known for their ferocity in battle. Shortly after the time period of this book, all the Khazar tribes are said to have converted to Judaism, and that conversion may well have been under way among some of the tribes in the late eight century, although historical details are scarce.

  Any real historical figures were far offstage in this particular book, but Jaffar and the caliph Harun al-Rashid were quite real. Jaffar was not yet vizier, but would soon replace his father in that post. Most of the scholars and reference books mentioned or consulted by Dabir and Jibril really did exist, once, but are now only known because of mentions in other texts or fragments of texts. Sometimes only the reputation of said authors remains. Poor Ocnus might have been brilliant; we have little to go on now but the opinion of one or two other writers who did not care for him, which may be a worse fate for an author even than to be completely forgotten.

  Speaking of authors, if Mosul and some of the other locations of this book have been brought to life, it is thanks in no small part to the travelogue of Ibn Jubayr, who described most of the cities I depicted. He was writing some two centuries after the time of Harun al-Rashid, but we can assume that most of the important places looked quite similar in both eras, for technology had changed little. Ancient Mosul was pretty much leveled by the Mongols, which means that any details aside from major landmarks mentioned by Ibn Jubayr are my own invention, although many of the more curious items were real—the number of universities along the river, for instance. Harran, heat-blasted though it was, really had long been famed for its school and scholars, and Ibn Jubayr describes its roofed marketplace.

  I strove to portray the tension on the border of the caliphate exactly as it was in these years, and there truly was a long series of forts between the Byzantine Greeks and the Abbasid caliphate, who were intermittently at war; there would be peace for a few months or a year, and then more attacks. When you imagine this warfare, though, you should not think of modern fighting, or even ancient campaigns of conquest like those of Alexander or even Belisarius. These conflicts seem to have been more like extended raids to acquire loot and slaves rather than territory, although some cities did change hands multiple times.

  A few words should be spared to the drinking of alcohol in the eighth century. Islamic tradition relays that the Koran was revealed to Muhammad by the Archangel Gabriel over many years, and earlier revelations concerning alcohol discouraged but did not forbid its consumption. The later revelations seem fairly clear on the matter, but those who wished to drink had many excuses, including mentions of it in older passages of the Koran, and in the eighth century wine was widely available and widely consumed. Some explained away the drinking of alcohol with legalese (taught that not one drop should be consumed, drinkers would spill one drop, then drink—and no, that doesn’t quite make sense to me, either, but let he who is without sin throw the first grape). Some would drink, then ask forgiveness, or try to reinterpret the Koran’s injunctions to mean something other than complete abstention. One way around, of course, was by imbibing sorts of alcohol not expressly forbidden—alcohol made from something other than grapes or dates. Later religious writers would point out that the revelations should be interpreted to mean any sort of intoxicant is off limits, but those writings didn’t seem to have come along at this time even if some imams are almost certain to have been speaking of the matter to their congregations.

  A word should also be spared for shatranj, which readers will have probably inferred is a forerunner to chess,
with similar pieces. One of the biggest differences between the games is that there is no queen in shatranj, and the corresponding vizier is not nearly as powerful. Late in the book, when Dabir mentions drawing out the queen, he is making an analogy to drawing out the king in shatranj, but uses a female title because the person they’re drawing out is, of course, a woman. In final editing I realized those in the know about shatranj might think I was confused about the pieces, and those who didn’t might assume the game had a queen. Rather than contorting the surrounding prose to explain shatranj pieces and show Asim deducing Dabir’s meaning, I decided to leave the text as it was, and explain matters here.

  In the writing of The Bones of the Old Ones I strove to simulate the people and period, but it must be remembered that this is a story of fiction, with fantastic elements, and there is much invention here, and in homage to the ancient tales of The Arabian Nights glitter is emphasized a little more than grit. Some names and concepts are simplified (for instance, the Greeks in this story would have thought of themselves as Romans, and the folk of the caliphate likely would have referred to them as Roumi). Some of the reference texts Dabir is reading probably weren’t available yet, and it is unlikely, though not completely impossible, that The Iliad had been translated and accessible, for it was scientific works that Arab translators found of greatest interest. It is improbable that the ancient languages Dabir and Jibril can read were still understood at the time, though not completely beyond the realms of possibility.

  Those seeking a more realistic description of life in these times can find a number of suggestions in the afterword to The Desert of Souls. Most of those same books were as useful in the writing of this book as that one, although this time I leaned even more heavily on the aforementioned Ibn Jubayr. I used three other sources, new to me, and will continue to use them moving forward. The first is a primary resource (translated by John Alden Williams) entitled The Early Abbasi Empire, by Al-Tabari, who, among other things, wrote an account of the important events and people of the Abbasid caliphate, setting down the events of the reign of Harun al-Rashid only a few generations after the caliph’s death. I found Amira K. Bennison’s The Great Caliphs highly engaging and full of interesting insight and anecdotes that brought the eighth century and its ruling set to life. Hugh Kennedy’s When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World was enlightening as well, and I recommend both books to readers interested in an entertaining and authoritative overview of the Abbasid caliphate.