The Arabian Nightmare

by Robert Irwin

  ‘What is Lazarus to the Arabian Nightmare?’

  ‘Lazarus lay ten days and nights in the grave before our Lord Jesus Christ raised him from it. By this we must understand that Jesus... No, I see you have no ear to hear about Our Lord. Understand, then, that when Lazarus rose from the grave and walked among men again, he carried with him an insect which had lain with him ten days and nights. This insect was one that haunted, for preference, graves and cemeteries. All dead men have their thoughts devoured by this creature; it eats through the brain and makes its home in the imaginative faculty, though the corpse, being dead, is not aware of its hungry appetite. Need I add that this insect is not to be understood literally? According to the blessed Niko, it is but a metaphor, signifying the fears of a Christian soul that it may stray into error through ignorance.’

  ‘Thank you, friar. That is what I wanted to know. It is just a Christian parable then.’

  ‘Just a parable! Just a parable! Christian parables are truer than the truth. Suffer no illusion, my son. There are leper knights in Cairo now. The Arabian Nightmare is here in Cairo now. It may be that even at this moment, by the curse of Lazarus, the torments of death are being laid upon the couches of the living. In the midst of life we are Balian had lost interest. Something had been dimly worrying him, something about the way in which the friar had earlier pronounced the name of Zuleyka. The confidence with which the friar had pronounced the name fanned his suspicions.

  ‘Do you know the woman Zuleyka whom I spoke of earlier?’

  ‘Er—I know her? Why, what man can truly say that he knows another man or indeed woman? To know oneself according to the ancient—’

  ‘It sometimes seems to me that anyone of any importance in this city knows everybody else of importance—importance, that is to say, in my history.’

  ‘Your history! What is your history that you pride yourself on it?’

  ‘Father, I told you, I think, that my dreams seem real to me. That is because my whole life has come to seem like a dream to me, shadow theatre, a mystery played by puppets, a card game in which I am the trump.’

  ‘A game? A play about you? Arrogance as well as sloth!’

  ‘Perhaps, but it’s what I feel. The puppeteer pulls my strings; those who know how to play my card play it—the Father of Cats, Yoll, probably you yourself. Only I, it seems, am not a player.’

  ‘This may be an indication of excessive humility rather than of arrogance... We shall see. What is this charade which you believe we are all playing at?’

  ‘Not a charade exactly, but the principles that divide men here are unreal. Vane says that he works for Christendom and takes money from the Sultan of Egypt; Yoll also says that he works for Christendom, yet he works to thwart the Father of Cats and Vane. Everybody, whomever he serves, seems to conspire to prevent me leaving Cairo. Everybody plays games with me. I think that you are one of the players. You are playing a game with me now.’

  The friar sighed and said, ‘Follow me.’

  Thinking that the friar was taking him to the altar at the far end of the caravanserai, Balian did so; but, pausing only at the gate to allow the friar to slip a coin into the extended hand of an Arab boy and whisper what was doubtless a blessing in his ear, they went out south through the streets of the city, heading in the direction of the Citadel. When, however, they drew near to its outer walls and began to climb, the friar led him a little to the east along the edge of the walls, and then they were scrambling up the slopes of Mount Muqattam towards its summit, which loomed over the highest walls of the Citadel. As they ascended, the scrubby sycamores and palmettos to be found on the lower slopes thinned and then disappeared. Little showers of stones and sand were dislodged with every step. The friar climbed without ceasing until just short of the summit, and Balian followed, dizzy and breathless. The sun had set, though some clouds high in the west were still fired by its rays. The city was already plunged in twilight. They stood looking down upon it.

  It seemed that the friar must speak, that the friar himself must confess and admit that there was no struggle between good and evil in the World, that there were not two parties to the struggle but only one, that party being of those who knew, and that those who did not know were their playthings. It seemed to Balian that this confident and erudite friar must admit him to the secret doctrine.

  At last the friar did speak. ‘Do you see the city below us? Do you see it? In the evening’s dimness does it not seem to you like a child’s toy or a gaming board and the people thronging its streets like tiny dolls or even insects? Up here do not their struggles and their ideals and their passions seem ridiculous?’

  Balian nodded.

  ‘So I thought it would. My son, in entertaining such thoughts you are playing with temptations as great and as damnable as those which Lucifer showed to Our Lord when he showed him all the kingdoms of the World in a moment of time. Think now, though, that whereas the Devil offered Our Lord the reality of temporal lordship over all those kingdoms, he is offering you only an illusory feeling of superiority over them. The illusion is one of distance. You should see a city of souls, not a gaming board; you should see men, not insects. You are young and your delusions are youthful arrogance. You think other men’s souls do not matter because you cannot believe in your own. Things are real and important whether you think they are or not. The time for games and mysteries is over. You have work to do. You made a vow to go on pilgrimage. I am privileged to know that you also gave an undertaking to the King of France; you must fulfil that too, for the King must have information on the strength of the infidel regiments. So go back down there and do the work you have undertaken. Idleness is your curse; it is not by chance that you have been afflicted in your sleeping.’

  ‘Ah, but how do I know that I am not sleeping now, and how do I know that you are not the Devil tempting me in my sleep?’

  The friar got down on his knees. Balian thought that he was going to kiss his feet, but the friar did no such thing. Instead he began to beat his head rhythmically on the ground, crying as he did so, ‘This is real! This is no dream! This is real!’ When at length he raised his head thin trickles of blood were coming down from the crown.

  ‘Yes, I see now,’ said Balian, embarrassed and frightened. Balian left him sitting on the slope and climbed wearily down towards the town.

  14

  A Tour of the Streets Ending

  in an Underground Chapel

  In my youth I visited the Circus of Ordeals almost every day. It was a favourite haunt of mine—it still is. How I envied those jugglers able to keep so many balls in the air at once! How I wished to be an acrobat! An acrobat or a clown. How pleasant to have called it to remembrance now! But I became a storyteller instead and I digress...

  Now the dark was coming on fast. The air broke up into an infinity of pearls of greyness. He was in a sombre mood as he came down the mount. All of a sudden, at the bottom of the slope, he was aware of a hand resting gently on his shoulder. He spun round and had time to catch the vision of two whitefaced men standing to either side of him before he started to run. They too came running behind in pursuit. Balian was heading north towards the area of the Tartar Ruins and aiming beyond them for the crowded and lively parts of the city, where he hoped his pursuers would be obliged to call off the chase.

  Juices of fear jetted round his heart, yet he was conscious also of a strange elation. Now that the hunt was on, he felt freer than at any time since he had entered the city.

  How many times had he not been hunted in this way in his dreams? Hunts that invariably ended with his waking with a full bladder—or more recently with a bleeding nose. He would have laughed if he had had the breath for it. Sand rose up in clouds about his heels. It seemed to him that he moved with terrifying speed; the truth was that he was weak from many days’ loss of blood and his run was scarcely more than a lope. The curious thing was that his pursuers’ pace was no faster as they struggled on behind him, their white robes fluttering in the air.
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  As Balian passed through the Tartar Ruins, a crowd of children ran alongside him for a while, laughing and shouting and making it utterly impossible that Balian should give his pursuers the slip. After a while the children, unable to draw a response from Balian, dropped away, but when he looked behind him he discovered that the number of his pursuers had increased to four. He was now moving across vast empty spaces of rubble and thornbush. All along the edge of the horizon the barking and yelping of packs of wild dogs could be heard. He knew that they could not possibly be hunting him, yet their noise gave Balian the feeling that, however strong his exhilaration, however fast and cunning his movements, the night could end only with his capture.

  He was coming into an inhabited area now, a quarter where many of the wealthy merchants resided, an area of wide streets and tall, monolithic facades which hung over him in the dying light like mountain faces. Balian moved through these architectural chasms, breathing with difficulty.

  If only he could find a patrol of the watch. At one point he would have swerved off to the left, down a street which would have taken him back to the caravanserai, but there his way was blocked by two more of the ragged huntsmen. Once he imagined that he saw one standing signalling from a rooftop, directing the hunt. The streets were getting narrower; often they were alleyways broad enough only for one man with comfort. Ways off were often blocked. He had forgotten that large parts of the city, the market places and bazaars would be barricaded at night and locked against thieves. His choices were diminishing. He was entering a part of the city which was unfamiliar to him. Finally there were no choices at all, as he found himself running down a cul-de-sac.

  He crashed to a stop against a studded door set in the wall and hammered on it. ‘Let me in. Help! Help!’ To his amazement the door was opened almost immediately and he fell inside, retching drily. The door swung closed behind him.

  For a few moments he lay on the ground with his eyes shut, willing his panicky heart to slow down. Then he rolled over, opened his eyes and looked up to see, shadowed against the sky, a young man standing over him. In the dimness he saw that he was in a garden, a rich man’s garden with rows of tamarinds, fig trees and carobs and decoratively plastered walls. His heart slowed eventually. He could hear nothing of his pursuers, but only voices, coming presumably from the women’s quarters, and the whine of mosquitoes. It was very quiet.

  ‘Who is the man who bangs at my gate at this hour? Who asks hospitality of Ismail ibn Umail? Was the watch after you?’

  ‘I am Balian of Norwich, a poor Christian pilgrim. I was—’

  ‘Oh, a Christian!’

  ‘I do not know who is after me. They must be outside your door now. They are not the watch and truly I should be very grateful if you would summon the watch for my protection.’

  ‘My walls and my servants are protection enough if need be. But what do they want from you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You must have done something.’

  ‘I was coming down from Muqattam, where I had been talking to one of our priests, when two men, but there are more now, tried to detain me. However, I escaped their grasp and ran, and fate and my running brought me here.’

  ‘And they chased you all the way from Muqattam to here! How intriguing... Yusuf! Ibrahim! Come here. Ibrahim, bring this man a drink. You sit here and drink this. Get your breath back.’ The young man patted Balian on the back sympathetically. ‘I’ll tell you what we are going to do. You rest a little while. Then we are going to have some sport. We’ll let you out of one of the side gates and give you a start. Then Yusuf, Ibrahim and I are coming after you. Then we’ll see who catches you first, us or your friends from Mount Muqat-tam. What fun we shall have!’

  ‘Bastard!’

  Balian continued to swear at him hysterically, but after only a little while his host clapped his hands excitedly and said, ‘Come, the hunt is up!’ and Balian was carried, squirming and kicking, to one of the side gates and cast out into the street. He could only run one way down it. At the other end a group of ragged men were casting about, stooping slightly and raising their faces to the sky, as if they were trying to sniff him out. When they saw him they gave chase. The passageways between the gardens of the rich were very narrow and unevenly cobbled. This second time Balian found it difficult to run at all. His rest, short as it had been, had stiffened his limbs. Once he thought he saw Ismail coming up behind him but only once, otherwise it was always the men in white who were moving up to take him. At every corner a choice, slipping and dodging in the darkness under the walls; each choice was more difficult and made the next choice more difficult yet.

  He was too tired to hide, too tired to take decisions. His legs were wobbling under him now and could not support him. He threw himself against a door lintel and clung to it. He shouted for it to open but this time it did not. They crowded round him and prised his grip apart. Somebody dragged a big stone over and brought it down upon his head. He was hit twice before he lost consciousness.

  Consciousness recovered, his lids were being pulled back, a wall of fire burned before his eyes and two strange eyes peered into his. ‘He is alive!’ The torches withdrew a little and, looking up, he could see that a pattern of brick vaulting swirled in an architectural vortex over his head and that he was in a chapel. Since there were no windows, he supposed that it might be underground. Half a dozen men sat around him, among them Yoll and Bulbul, but the leading figure had to introduce himself.

  ‘I am Jean Cornu, Grand Master of the Poor Knights of St Lazarus, chosen emissary of his Holiness the Pope in Egypt. The others here need no introduction, some because you have met them already, others because they do not wish your memory to be burdened with their names. ’ The men in white lowered their faces. Balian made no response and Cornu resumed. ‘We have taken the opportunity of your loss of consciousness to examine you. For a while we thought we were examining a dead man... fatigue, loss of blood, that mark on your head. I imagine you were glad to be caught.’ Cornu stood up and started to pace about the chapel around the others with measured steps. ‘Here let me say that it pains me that my men beat you. I had not intended that, but then we had not expected that you would run from us like that. We came looking for you as friends and fellow Christians. I had thought that I was the Good Shepherd fetching in a stray from his flock.’ His smile was without humour. ‘As you must have guessed, the friar took you up on the mount for us; we did not want to come for you in the caravanserai.’

  Balian waited until Cornu reached the end of the chapel and turned again. ‘What do you want with me?’

  ‘A good question! The answer is nothing. A better question would be, “What did we want with you?” and the answer to that would have been that we wished to examine you to determine if you were the expected Messiah or if you had the Arabian Nightmare or, if neither of these things was so, why the Father of Cats has taken such an interest in you.’

  ‘And what have you discovered?’

  Now the friar entered the room. Like Balian’s, his forehead was still covered in blood. Cornu ignored both the friar’s arrival and Balian’s question.

  ‘It is God’s work that we do here. Among our duties are the protection of Christendom, by force of arms if necessary, and the succour of the sick. Our present task in Cairo involves both of these.’ He turned again. His pacing, Balian observed, made everyone uneasy. Only Bulbul, who had withdrawn to a corner to write, was able to ignore it.

  I am told that you came to Cairo with a mission given to you by the French to spy out the strength and deployment of the Sultan’s legions and the quality of their equipment.’

  Balian nodded.

  ‘What have you done to fulfil your mission?’

  There could be no answer to this. Cornu’s lip curled unmistakably.

  ‘Well, it is not important. There are bigger affairs afoot now. It is true also that you have tried several times to leave Cairo and failed?’

  Balian nodded. Cornu was behind
him now.

  ‘Why was that?’

  Balian croaked in his nervousness, ‘The Dawadar refused me a visa to leave. Nevertheless I tried to leave without the permission of the authorities, but things went wrong. I fell ill. Even so I made many efforts to walk out of the city, but I was alone and I lost my way. Sometimes enemies barred my path and I was unaided. Sick, I was shunned by my fellow Christians, yet I pray nightly to St Catherine and all the saints that they will assist me to leave this place. Many times I have set off, hungry and destitute as I was, on the road out of Cairo, yet it seems to me that all the roads turn inwards.’

  Yoll, who had hitherto been rocking backwards and forwards, broke in here, clawing the air in his excitement. ‘Perhaps all the roads in Cairo do turn inwards! There is a story of a city that became trapped in a bead of sweat from the brow of a —’

  Cornu cut him short impatiently. ‘We have heard also that you were offered treatment by the Father of Cats for an illness, the precise nature of which is not clear. You shed blood when you wake in the mornings?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Yoll banged his forehead against his palm. His ape, startled, leapt off his master’s shoulder and vanished into the darkness. He said, ‘It is a stigma. Perhaps he is the Fifth Messiah that we all expect.’

  ‘The Messiah will come when we least expect him, ’ the friar cut in coldly.

  ‘Therefore he will come when we are expecting him, since that will be when we are least expecting him,’ Yoll retorted. ‘Therefore he will not.’

  ‘Enough!’ The friar and Yoll regarded one another, scowling, while Cornu resumed, visibly irritated. ‘Of course the Messiah is coming; the only question is whose will he be? His or ours? If it is the Messiah of the Father of Cats, then we have nothing to look forward to, and if this dim, ragged, helpless youth were the Messiah, then nobody would care whether he had come or not.’

  Then Balian spoke, fumbling for the words. ‘I am certainly not the Fifth Messiah, whatever that is. I am Balian, a gentleman of Norwich, and I require of you to tell me what you want of me and why you brought me here. Then, after satisfying my curiosity, I hope you will let me leave.’