by Robert Irwin
The point I am approaching, in my usual oblique fashion, is that Yoll is not dictating this story. Yoll is dead. What is more, Yoll never was dictating the story. There has been a muddle about identity. It is coming clearer now. I am not yet ready to reveal who I am. I shall do so at the end of the story. Obviously that moment is coming soon. The reader feels with his fingers the diminishing number of pages which remain to be turned and adjusts his expectations accordingly. The reader is warned. As the pages diminish, so do the number of possible solutions. I scratch my head. There is nothing I can do about that. All I can hope is that, to return to the theme with which I opened, finally it will be unclear where the burden of my book ended and the contents of your dreams began.
For the moment, though, your sleep and my self-revelation must wait. Sometimes in a dream a man will struggle to do something serious, such as recite a passage from Holy Scripture or cast up accounts. He will never succeed. The denizens of the Alam al-Mithal will lay him low. Read and be instructed...
There was a Christian and a Muslim theory behind the operation. Vane used concepts from both to explain the process to Balian. According to Niko of Cologne and the followers of the Rhineland school of Spiritual Medicine, there were five orifices in a man’s skin, five wounds which leaked—the penis, the anus, the ears, the mouth and the nose—and from these wounds seeped the biles, black, yellow and white, signifying according to their admixture that all was not well within the body’s terra incognita. The Arab physicians accepted this on the whole while rejecting the typological analogy which Niko had made between the five orifices and the marks of the Passion of Christ; they pointed out that, more accurately counted, the orifices were six in number (for the Basran school took account of the fact that there were two ears) or seven (for the Kufan school took account of the fact that there were two nostrils also). But the wise men of the Arabs were united in emphasizing the properties of the nose, for ‘it is with the nose that one draws in the rooh, the breath of life, and within the nose that one sleeps,’ according to Ibn Umail.
After much thought, the Father of Cats had come to the conclusion that Balian’s post-oneiric loss of blood was due to an excess of pressure in the front ventricle of the brain. As everyone knows, thought rises from the heart as a vapour and condenses in the brain as a thick yellow fluid or snot, which, when it is sufficiently concentrated after, say, some twelve hours or so, regularly produces sleep. According to the Father of Cats, it was this excess snot, yellow bile, which was putting pressure on the blood in the front ventricle.
The Father was ready now. With arms folded he moved to the end of the bed. ‘I am going to attempt a very simple cure,’ he said.
Balian screamed briefly before a servant covered his mouth with a pad of aromatic smelling cotton. Then another servant passed a red-hot spoon into the gloved hand of the Father. This he applied to Balian’s nostrils. At first there was only pain. It felt as though the Father was trying to draw his brains out with a pair of red-hot pincers. Then there was a loosening, and, to the old man’s evident pleasure, thick gobs of yellow fluid began to emerge. Balian fainted.
When he came round they showed him the bile neatly bottled and sealed in small glass jars.
‘What have you done that for?’
‘We shall sell the stuff. There are innumerable reasons why some men cannot sleep. The biggest single reason, though, is fear of boredom. Many insomniacs would envy you your vivid dreams. I shall make your bile into a paste and I shall be surprised if I do not get a good price for it.’
‘And am I cured?’
‘The symptoms at least are cured. Really, the ultimate cure is up to you. You must make a definite effort in the years to come not to think so much. You have more thoughts than actions and this, as any physician of sleep will tell you, generates enormous pressure inside you.’
‘You have been like a kettle boiling on a stove,’ Vane put in.
‘And I have not got the Arabian Nightmare?’
‘By the beard of the Prophet, no! It is one thing to dream that you have the Arabian Nightmare, quite another actually to have it!’
‘You know that Jean Cornu and his following have examined me and have told me not only that I do not have the Arabian Nightmare but also that I am not the promised Messiah.’
‘Yes, yes. That is very good. I presume that you did not want to have the Arabian Nightmare or be the Messiah?’
‘No, of course not. But, for God’s sake, why then have you and your familiar been pursuing me across Cairo?’
Vane gave him a lupine grin and the Father of Cats shook his head sorrowfully, saying, ‘You are still a child really. You think that the world is enclosed by your vain self-preoccupations and that the sun revolves around you. You thought that Vane and I were hunting you. I assure you, this was not so. How many times have you really met us—outside your dreams, that is? You don’t know us at all, I suspect. All that you know is what is projected by your fantasy. It may be hard for you to accept but I assure you that you are of no importance at all in the wider world, simply a man who needed treatment for an illness.’
With that the Father of Cats departed and Vane remained only to hiss, ‘Think yourself lucky that you were treated by us. Some physicians, thejews especially, would have slit your throat first and then cut your skull open to extract your precious snot!’
Balian lay apathetically back on the pillow. They still had not undone his bonds.
The Dawadar was dreaming about two princesses who lived on top of a tower. The tower had no staircase. It had been built that way by order of the Sultan. The Dawadar stood at the foot of the tower and, looking up, discovered that the two princesses were in fact his daughters. Shouting down to him, they explained that they had been imprisoned there because the people had discovered that they had been sharing their souls with the daughters of the Father of Cats. The ‘princesses’ had done this purely out of kindness, but the people feared them for it and had built the tower under them. By day their souls were their own, but at night the daughters of the Father of Cats took the souls and went walking in the streets with them. The Dawadar received an image of his daughters lying unconscious on the roof of the tower, ghostly music rising from their open mouths. He summoned a water-seller and asked him why he would not help his daughters. The water-seller muttered something obscene.
‘My daughters, is all well with my daughters?’ The Dawadar found himself addressing this question to his deputy and his eunuch of the bed chamber. They were too excited to pay any attention to his drowsy utterance.
‘We have caught the murderous lady, just as she was about to take another victim with her knife near the Roda Nilometer. Her name is Fatima, and she claims some sort of connection with the Father of Cats. The Sultan summons you to the Dar al-Adl within the hour.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Not yet time for the dawn prayer.’
It was very cold in the Dar al-Adl. Sleepy emirs, pulled out of bed to view Fatima the Deathly, warmed their hands around a ring of braziers, while slaves ran to get cloaks and rugs for the deliberating courtiers. Fatima was already before the Sultan when the Dawadar arrived. She turned her startlingly white face towards him briefly and the sultan, seeing that his senior officer had arrived, opened the proceedings. At the Sultan’s signal an officer narrated the circumstances of Fatima’s arrest, then Qaitbay spoke.
‘Murderess, you should know that, though the Gate of justice is now open to you, it would be foolish to pretend that this trial does not have a predetermined end. This afternoon you will be taken out to the Zuweyla Gate to dance with Melsemuth. Now you have the ear of the Sultan and his council, so speak.’
Fatima spoke with great difficulty and her voice was almost lost in the great majlis.
‘No. You cannot threaten me with Melsemuth. My sister’s madness has already destroyed me. I am Fatima, incestuous daughter of the Father of Cats and his daughter Zuleyka, a whore of the Ezbekiyya Quarter. I have killed many men and wo
men, all customers of the Father of Cats. I killed only his customers and I acted only as a surgeon does who cuts out the buboes from a plague-stricken body. His disciples pass the Arabian Nightmare round the city in a little box and he plots the ruin of your state.’
‘Every day we hear of a hundred plots or more. Who will support your accusation?’
‘No one speaks, yet I see several of his customers here.’ Though she spoke slowly and without emphasis, the guards around the Sultan redoubled their vigilance. But she was to say no more. She raised her arm accusingly before the Sultan. The arm dropped off and smashed on the floor in a cloud of dust. Nobody moved as she fell away in a mound of rags and fast disintegrating bones. Finally one of the khassakiyya guard beside her turned and tentatively kicked the heap.
‘A phantasm.’
‘A creation of the Sleep Teacher.’
Courtier sages commented on the miracle, and a halting discussion of what was to be done began. The Sultan was reluctant to act and the Dawadar just shrugged his shoulders.
In the end, however, the Sultan spoke. ‘For centuries in Egypt there have been two governments. I hold the sword and staff of visible government in this land, but every man knows that there is an invisible government, though no man knows its nature. Let no man speak of what has happened here this morning. We shall make our preparations, and in the evening we shall go to uncover the mysteries of the House of Sleep. Take that rubbish away and have it burnt.’
They dispersed.
The waters of the fountain ran gurgling over the flagstones in the courtyard of the House of Sleep.
That afternoon Balian was unstrapped from his bed. The Father of Cats motioned him up.
‘We have cured the body; perhaps music will heal the spirit. Will you join us in attending a musical interlude?’
‘I suppose that I have no choice?’
‘It is as you suppose.’
Almost the entire household was there, headed by Vane and Salim the porter. At the end of the room sat the three musicians, flat-faced men from Central Asia, with their instruments, the ney, the rebec and the frame drum. A dancing boy stood before them. A silk scarf hung suggestively around his silver-trousered hips.
As soon as the ney first sounded its sinuous yearnings, those hips began to waggle. Then the rebec came in, providing a rhythmic frame through which the strains of the ney had to weave. Finally, at no particular point, the drum joined in, its rhythms sometimes emphasizing, sometimes counterpointing, those of the rebec. The rhythms were harsh and awful to Balian’s ear, from the very first making an impatient rush towards an appointed end, yet delaying themselves in melancholy repetition and refrain, doublings and triplings of structures that turned about and consumed themselves, passionate contradictions and collisions, and through it all the ney meandered with reedy complaint. The deaf and visionless boy shimmered and swayed as directed by the third ear, that of balance. He was like the snake which does not hear the music of the snake charmer but, earless, follows the movements of the flute with its eyes. The voices of the orchestra accompanied him in melismatic chant. The plangent note of the ney deepened. The boy executed a series of steps, his bare feet slapping against the tiles, and began almost imperceptibly to vibrate as if a thread had been drawn through him from the earth to the sky and plucked.
Conversation broke out and became general. Vane observed that they had been listening to what was really an evening mode. ‘It is like a story begun at the hour of the isha prayer; those who listen know that the storyteller must conclude before curfew.’
The Father of Cats sat abstracted. He was listening to something else. There were scuffling sounds outside. Conversation stopped and Salim rushed to the window. Balian followed. Down below, the alley was crowded and some of the crowd were looking up curiously. Others were shaking their fists. It was from the other side of the room, however, that trouble came. Suddenly the bolt on the door snapped and the door swung inwards. A pair of Mamluke guards entered and behind them came the Dawadar, looking elegant as ever and very amused at the effect his entry had created. Behind him were perhaps another half-dozen Mamlukes.
‘Greetings to the master of this house. Blessings and peace on those here who walk in righteousness. I beg the Father to believe me when I say that I would not willingly inconvenience him or his guests’ (and here he saluted them respectfully) ‘but I have here a firman from the Sultan directing me to escort you to the Citadel and to detain you within its walls for as long as he shall be pleased, and the Sultan’s will must be obeyed by you and me alike.’ The Dawadar raised his eyebrows in mock commiseration. ‘Come with me, please.’
The Father did not move. ‘In obeying the will of the Sultan, one follows only one’s own true will, so I have always found. An invitation from the Sultan is always welcome.’ The Father’s voice was silky. ‘May I inquire the reason for the Sultan’s need of my presence?’
‘An officer of the Sultan will never deny a request so courteously made. A certain lady, one Fatima (she is now dead, by the way), was brought before the Sultan this morning charged with many notorious murders. In the course of her short trial she made accusations against you which were doubtless absurd and certainly hard to understand. That is the matter in brief. We look forward to your assistance in interpreting her words.’
‘Oh, in that case—’ The Father of Cats looked at Salim and snapped his fingers. Salim made a rush at the Dawadar and was fended off by one of the guards. They collapsed in a wrestling heap on the floor. Meanwhile Vane had launched himself on another of the guards. While some of the disciples ran to find arms, the fight spread across the room and into the colonnade. The musicians huddled into a corner. The boy sat among them, trembling, his hands over his face. The Father stood a little to one side of Balian, a staff raised over his head—whether in menace or for magic, it was unclear. No one dared approach him. Balian heard him shout to one of his students to run and fetch help from Jean Cornu and his following.
Balian briefly noted this strange and unexpected instruction without trying to explain it to himself. Perhaps he had misheard the Father? Without a weapon Balian felt that he was powerless to join in the fight (and for whom, he wondered, should he fight anyway?). Vane’s long knife had come out from under his ratskin coat and he was the first to claim a victim. Suddenly his free hand dropped to his belt and then he sent an open pouch of pepper flying into the face of his opponent. Then he rushed in to disembowel the blinded Mamluke. Soon there was pepper everywhere, for Vane was not the only disciple of the Father to carry such a purse as protection against footpads. The sounds were awful—a common trick was to close in and slash the enemy’s hams, and several men lay or sat screaming in agony on the edge of the conflict. Two swarthy antagonists, having lost their weapons, were engaged rhythmically in trying to smash each other’s skulls against the wall. After the first nervous onslaught and savage manoeuvre, the fighting slowed. The struggle was becoming one of stamina, and already some men could hardly lift their weapons and stood cautiously facing one another, bending forward, convulsively trying to regain their breath.
Fresh impetus came to the fight with the arrival of the lepers. The door swung open a second time. For a moment Jean Cornu, in full armour but for a helmet, stood there, filling the doorway. Then, drawing his sword, he entered and behind him thronged a mass of scarred and awful warriors, the leper knights and attendant mendicants. The Mamlukes were exhausted, outnumbered and, above all, terrified of their new opponents. Even the Dawadar, who at first had tried to avoid personal combat, was now hard-pressed and reluctantly fighting to defend his life. It seemed that victory was within the grasp of the Father of Cats—and of Jean Cornu.
Then, quite suddenly, the fighters drew apart. One heard the breath rasp in exhausted men’s lungs and the occasional whimper of pain. A third time the gates of the House of Sleep had been forced open, this time by the officers of the Sultan. A hundred or more Mamlukes poured into the courtyard and fanned out through the house. First
one emir, then another, elbowed their way into the concert room where the Father of Cats and Jean Cornu now stood side by side. Finally Qaitbay himself entered and the escort behind him poured into the already crowded room. Mamluke guards with drawn swords filed along the walls.
The Sultan just stared at the Father of Cats angrily. Then the Father spoke. ‘I bid you welcome. It grieves me that the Sultan should find my house in such disarray.’ A dying man moaned. ‘We were not prepared for your visit.’
‘And we did not expect that you would refuse the invitation that we sent you with the Dawadar.’
‘Even so, I now hurry to obey its summons.’
‘It is not necessary to inconvenience yourself. We shall hold your trial here.’
‘My trial? Who has accused me, and what am I accused of?’
‘Fatima, a lady accused of murder, on being brought before us, claimed a connection with you and accused you of conspiring to overthrow the state.’
‘Bring forth this witness, so that I may confute her lies.’
‘She no longer exists.’
‘Then no one accuses me and I am not accused.’
‘You are impertinent. There are other charges and we have found other witnesses.’ Then, to the Mamluke guards, ‘Have these two brought down into the courtyard.’
Everyone trooped down into the courtyard where, surrounded by khassakiyya guards, a lady, veiled and robed in black, stood before a black sedan chair borne on the shoulders of Nubian slaves.
The Dawadar pointed to the woman languidly. ‘This woman here accuses Jean Cornu, known in the West as the Grand Master of the Poor Knights of St Lazarus, of the murder of Dirty Yoll, a storyteller famous throughout Cairo, but she also accuses the Father of Cats of having “put the ape on Yoll’s back”, this last expression is, I presume, an obscure piece of criminal argot.’
Balian scrutinized the squat form carefully and identified it as that of Yoll’s sister, Mary.