by Неизвестный
My brother and sister and I had wide eyes, open ears, strong jaws with able teeth. We wrestled and nipped and played about the sandy floor of our den—we were learning to prefer meat to milk but our dam had not yet taken us out under the sky and the moon to teach us scavenging, foraging, killing.
She did not come home.
We were animals, cubs, unaware of time. Perhaps it was only a day later, perhaps five, that—squabbling and hungry—I employed my powerful jaws and able teeth to gash open my sister’s belly and drag out her entrails. Her blood was so hot, so sweet. It was some while before I would permit my brother a turn at her carcass.
Possibly he was cleverer than I. When I woke from glutted slumber he was gone, our sister’s ravaged corpse dragged away with him. Disconsolate, I crunched up and swallowed down the single shinbone he had left me, and then I made to follow him.
The world outside the den was terrifyingly big, hurtfully bright: it was day. Whining, giggling with unease, I retreated to the comforting dark.
Hunger drove me out at dusk. I followed the trail my brother had made dragging what was left of our sister. I began to smell fresher blood and to hear noises, horrible noises, chuckles and coughs and chirps. Peering between a rock and a leafy bush, I saw a wake of black vultures squabbling over the corpse of my small brother and our sister’s few disjointed bones.
I do not remember a great deal of what followed. Where I stumbled, what I ate, where I slept, how I avoided becoming prey, for how many nights and days. I smelled meat. Not fresh, but fresh enough. I had come, I recognize now, upon a graveyard, a human graveyard. A paltry place outside a paltry village. Stumbling among the narrow hummocked or sunken graves, I followed the ripe scent. As I came nearer, I became aware of a different, lighter odor—living meat.
I saw the living meat first, an oddly formed animal. I was not so famished its largeness didn’t make me wary, but neither did it fill me with revulsion and horror as the vultures had. It bore a kind of plumage that confused its shape but I recognized that it stood easily on its hind legs while its forepaws covered its mouth and muffled its low-pitched cries. Keeping to downwind shadows, I prowled about, my attention divided between the peculiar creature and the turned earth that covered the dead meat. I was so very hungry.
The earth shifted. Possibly because I was an unreasoning animal, possibly because I was an inexperienced cub, although I knew the buried meat was dead I was less startled by the physical action of a forepaw very like the living creature’s thrusting out of the quaking soil to scrabble at the air than by its size. It seemed twice as large as the standing animal’s. Then the meat bucked its shoulder and hip and began to wriggle its entire carcass from the ground.
I had gone down to a crouch. I felt the mane rise along my spine. Meanwhile, the living animal’s cries had grown higher pitched, louder, and I could sense its terror. Its—his. It was Farid, a boy of nine summers whose beloved father had died of a sudden fever the afternoon before. Hours after the funeral, Farid had returned to his baba’s grave, hours after his baba’s soul had answered the angels’ three questions and been dispatched to await the day of resurrection. Farid’s uncle, that vile man with sons of his own at his house in Beirut, had beaten him.
All this I learned later, after I learned to be a human boy myself, to speak and listen and understand.
The ghul that had taken possession of Farid’s father’s corpse levered itself from the soil, tearing away its linen shroud. It had been laid to rest on its side, turned toward the holy city and, by some luck, facing me. Its senses were confused and its slight intelligence overwhelmed by hunger—it knew there were two living creatures nearby, two prey, and that the boy was more suitable but I was closer.
But I also was consumed by hunger. Somehow, too, I hated the monster, even more than I had hated the vultures. As it lurched to its knees and reached for me with clawed hands, I leapt from my crouch. My jaws latched on its swollen belly, teeth ripped through skin and muscle. The corpse had been dead too long for blood to burst or flood but bad air blew between my teeth, and then offal tumbled from the gash. The ghul’s odious taint had already suffused the meat—it tasted bitter on my tongue, burning.
A living man, any animal, would have gone down. Neither the ghul nor the meat it animated was alive. Its fists bashed at me, pushing me off, and its small dull teeth clashed. It was strong, unnaturally strong, strong as death itself.
On the far side of the violated grave, Farid stood trembling but as rooted as a tree. His whimpers and gasps came thick as moths about a flame. I do not know if a ghul has the capacity to hear but it was well aware of Farid’s presence. I do know a ghul will choose human over animal prey every time—perhaps flesh animated by true intelligence is more nourishing. Once the ghul had tossed me aside, it clambered to its feet and turned toward the boy. When loops of trailing entrails threatened to tangle its legs, it paused a moment only to rip them from the wound in its gut.
I was bruised but not hurt. I felt powerful unanimal emotions which, when I look back, I see were the true sign I was unlike other hyenas: anger. A brilliant fury that the monster mistook me for so little threat. A dreadful wanting to kill the thing that was entirely separate from my hunger, and a thrilling fear that I could not kill it for it was so much bigger and stronger than I and already dead. A hot, despairing compassion for the terrified boy who was its true prey. A potent, uncanny cunning.
In an instant more I had leapt again and locked my teeth in the tendons at the back of the corpse’s knee and severed them. It did not understand it was lamed until it attempted another step and collapsed. The boy uttered a series of full-throated shrieks as I snapped at the fallen corpse’s thrashing limbs, ripping muscles and tendons, cracking bones. As long as it was able, it beat at me with its hands, but I was too clever, too fast. My jaws clamped around its throat—if it were a living creature requiring breath it should have strangled before I crushed its spine.
Retching, I retreated. The vile thing twitched and shuddered on the disturbed earth, body too damaged for unnatural will to command, will too potent to subside or withdraw. Its dead eyes brightened with hatred as it gazed on me, and I stumbled farther back, and then the eyes dulled as the ghul acknowledged the wreck of its corporeal weapon and withdrew.
Stumbling again, I collided with petrified Farid, who moaned and crumpled. I knew no way to comfort him in my natural form—I knew that whatever savage beast he took me for would frighten him nearly as much as the ghul. I did not understand why I needed to comfort him, but it was a compelling need so I rubbed my great head against his flank and made mewling sounds in my throat and patted at him with my paw until it became a delicate, hairless, uncallused human hand. Farid did not witness the transmutation of my flesh for he had fainted. When I was entirely changed, I dug up loose earth with my clever new paws and buried the broken corpse of his father again—the notion of feeding upon it revolted me although I was still famished. Then I curled up in the graveyard dirt beside the other boy and slept.
The clopping of hooves on stone paving roused me from memory. Blinking away sorrowful visions of Farid’s face as I had seen it first with human vision, I shifted position slightly and pulled the shemagh lower to hide the shine from my eyes. The guards across the way closed the palace gates behind the caliph slumped in his donkey’s saddle. I saw little to distinguish al-Hakim from a humble fellah riding home from the city market to his small farm or the grandee’s tomb he had appropriated at al-Qarafa. Perhaps the jellabiya’s wool was of tighter weave but its dull black was as drab, perhaps the caliph’s mount was better fed, better groomed. I saw no evidence this sayyid’s flesh encompassed, as his followers believed, the living light of God, still less—as ad-Darazi had proclaimed—God’s essential nature: he appeared merely a man, this caliph of all Islam: a man weary of the world before his time. I was the cure for his weariness, I told myself, though I would make sure he never knew it.
I let him ride a little way ahead before I began to
follow, keeping to shadow and darting as stealthily as if I had returned to my natural form. He passed through the wealthy quarters surrounding the palace with their high walls around subtle gardens and luxurious residences. When he came to the city gate, the guards required a word before they recognized him and let him pass. He did not appear to resent their suspicions. Slipping through after, I heard the younger guard marvel the caliph should be so courteous.
Once al-Hakim had ridden beyond the slumbering slums outside the gate, I must fall farther behind in order not to be seen. I felt no worry about losing him, however. The moon was full and high in the cold dome of sky sequinned with an infinite number of brittle stars. The worry came when I realized he had chosen the well travelled road to al-Qarafa. Killing him within sight of the city of the dead would be unwise.
In the event, he turned his donkey off the road soon after the domes and towers of the necropolis became visible under moonlight, riding into the Muqattam foothills without benefit of a path. The terrain was uncertain but the donkey sure footed—as was I, following unseen. We climbed some distance, eventually reaching a kind of vale among higher ridges. When I looked back, I saw the great walled bulk of the city reduced to an architect’s model, gates marked by candle flames. Beyond ran the wide expanse of the river like black glass that reflected moon and stars. Below, nearer, torches and cooking fires burned among the avenues of al-Qarafa. I could not actually smell the smoke but it seemed to me I could, and underlying it the faint perfume of corruption although, in desiccated Egypt, rot is not so pervasive as in damper climates.
I turned again to look for the caliph. He had dismounted and hobbled his donkey. I saw the patient animal but had to glance about to find the man. Kneeling some feet away, al-Hakim was still as a wind-weathered boulder, nearly indistinguishable from the landscape, the contours and folds of his garments carved by moonlight into solid rock. He faced away from me, oriented, I imagined, on the qibla axis toward the holy city.
Like any predator, an assassin cannot afford scruples. It would be best for me simply to dispatch al-Hakim, here where the corpse would not be found without search, and then go on about my other business. But like any other predator I am prey to curiosity and, as a man prone to reflection myself, I wondered about his purpose in retreating to the wilderness. It had never been a requirement of my meditations that I go into seclusion . . . but I was not a descendant of the blessed Messenger of God who received God’s words from the angel Jibril during his own retreats to isolated Hira.
Careful to remain upwind of the donkey, I made my silent way around the vale until I could see al-Hakim’s face where he knelt so still, and then I settled to my haunches. I believe I have never seen a visage so rapt, so joyously calm, as the caliph’s that night. It seemed I could make out every detail as if I sat in the sand just before him, as the student sits before his teacher. His eyes were open but unseeing, upraised toward the heavens. I seemed to see every thread of silver in the beard of a man past his youth—the slight smile on parted lips—the fans of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and the deep lines on his brow. I seemed to see an unearthly radiance within his eyes.
This was a nonsense, a distraction. I lowered my gaze. Those who claimed Abu ‘Ali as the true and only caliph and imam, heir of ‘Ali and Hasan and Husayn, believed he was the earthly vessel of God’s immortal light and revelation, but I was not of their number. I had experience of things other men would call miraculous, uncanny—my own existence—but I had never encountered evidence of God’s hand interfering in the day-to-day business of men or beasts.
I glanced again at the caliph. Now the very skin of his face and the hands loose in his lap appeared to glow with the same radiance, as if a pure white flame burned within his flesh. Before I could be snared by wonder I turned away. Whatever Abu ‘Ali was, what his followers believed and enemies feared or something else again, I had entered into a bargain with the Baghdadi in that Cairo teashop: he had fulfilled his part and now was the time for me to do mine. To kill this person without passion or prejudice, as I had slain many others before and would again.
I reached to loosen my keen steel dagger in its sheath . . . hesitated. The man I was hesitated, awed.
I was not only a man. A hyena, innocent of reason, knows neither awe nor sentiment. Loosening the garments that clothed human flesh, I set aside my equivocal, scrupulous humanity, and the hyena shuddered off heavy wool and linen fabrics weighted with a man’s pungent sweat and the stenches of the city.
Four footed, naked in my winter pelt, I took two steps away from the man’s garments and sat again, lifted my muzzle to sniff at the air, looked about. Hyena eyes saw more keenly in the night. The other man, my prey, knelt unmoving in his place. His donkey waited patiently. On the mild, persistent dry breeze up from the lowlands, I scented carrion, a smell that caused saliva to flood my mouth and dragged a whimper up my throat.
Not dead meat only. I scented the dire, deathless odor of ghul that is not truly a smell, and the mane between my shoulders and down my spine rose. As I brought myself to my feet, I heard the thumps and scrapes of dead men’s feet on sand and rock, and the caliph’s donkey, my fellow animal, also heard or scented something amiss, lifted its head, uneasy. Uncomfortably sympathetic, I seemed to feel the beast’s shudder in my own muscles, the resistance when it tried to take a step against the hobble between its ankles, and then the donkey brayed.
The piteous cry would wake the dead had they not already been awakened. I discovered I had retreated some steps from the pile of clothing I would wish to don if I allowed myself to become a man again. Backed up against an immovable boulder, I had gone to a crouch. The giggling cry of my kind that so disturbs the ears of men rattled my throat.
In the vale below, the panicked donkey broke its mercifully loose hobble. With another bray, it cantered past its unmoving master, away from the approaching ghuls.
I saw them now, the shambling dead. More than two—my hyena mind incapable of counting: a number, five or seven or ten, both dead women and dead men clambering clumsily up from the plain. Some still wore tatters of the stained white linen wrapped about them before they were laid to rest in al-Qarafa but most staggered naked in their desiccated skin that clung to shrunken muscle and sharp bone. A lambent glow flickered in the deep sockets of their eyes, a light harsh and dry as smoldering coals, unlike the liquid reflections on a living person’s eyes or the supernal, unwavering luster I had witnessed in the eyes of contemplative al-Hakim.
Startled, I looked for him, the caliph. Serenely unaware, he had not stirred from his posture of meditation or rapture, facing away from advancing slaughter. With hyena’s eyes, I saw the radiance within him, liquid as mercury or molten steel but calm, untroubled. A remnant of the scrupulous man in the beast of prey’s skull wished to warn him but the beast was near panic with horror and loathing and the assassin reflected I had been paid to see him dead: it was not required my own teeth or claws or steel release the life from his flesh.
The scrape of bone bound by withered gristle to bone against stone and sand had carried all the wake of ghuls into the vale. Like a pack of starved pariah dogs, they shuffled or staggered after their leader, a corpse somewhat fresher, still fleshy, whose gait was nearly a stride, whose hands were raised in skeletal claws, whose leathery lips were drawn back in a rictus snarl from dry ivory teeth, whose sunken eyes burned with unholy fire. Cringing, whimpering my giggle of horror, I shrank back against rock that prevented flight, that offered no protection.
At last the caliph seemed to become aware of approaching doom. First he bowed toward the holy city, touching his brow and his palms to the earth, and then he rose to his feet, graceful as a crane. For a moment, he gazed into the defile where his panicked mount had fled. The skin of upraised hands and face gleamed silver in moonlight as he began to turn, his eyes glowed brighter still, like flame behind glass, as if he were a lantern of flesh scarcely tempered enough to contain the radiance within.
His motion was
slow, unhurried. When he faced me, he seemed to pause for an instant, and I felt he had known my presence all along, as man and now as animal, my intent—known, acknowledged . . . forgiven. His radiance suffused me to bursting, and my substance melted from brute hyena to the chilled, naked flesh of a man capable of wonder, and al-Hakim bi Amr al-Lah continued to turn.
The caliph did not awe the ghuls. I could not look away. It seemed, indeed, that the pure light he barely contained irritated or attracted them, for their shuffle quickened, their clawed hands waved aimlessly, their dry joints creaked and groaned, and al-Hakim waited. I could not look away.
Unlike animals, even unlike men, they were clumsy killing him though he did not struggle, inept, unclean. His radiance brightened and brightened as they ripped at his garments and tore his flesh. His brilliant blood fountained over them, refreshing their dried-out meat and sinew, smelling rich and fragrant, increasing their frenzy. One wrenched his left arm from the shoulder and staggered away, gnawing at unclean fingers while two others fought to dispossess it of its prize. The uncomplaining body of the caliph collapsed beneath the weight of the ravening ghuls but his being continued to shine, to shine, pulsing like the beat of a laboring heart.
I could not look away until the caliph’s illumination flared up like the dawn, blinding me, and was catastrophically snuffed out. As I collapsed into darkness, I continued to hear the dreadful clacking and grinding of the ghuls’ weak jaws and dull teeth, the blows of their boney hands against sodden flesh.
In my faint, I found myself once again in the house in Beirut where that man had brought his orphaned nephew and Farid’s peculiar, savage companion. He liked to have me there, bound, raging, while he abused my friend. Farid sobbed under his uncle’s brutal weight, moaned when the man’s prick stabbed into him, howled when he was slapped and buffetted, gurgled when he was choked. The man laughed when the boy died—then shrieked when the snarling hyena slipped free of bonds meant to hold a human child and stalked across the floor toward him, stiff legged, bristling.