Salvage Rites: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  ‘Values differ,’ Bunny explained to me casually one day, some six months after we first met. ‘For instance, Linda, did you know that I own slaves?’

  I was so surprised that I giggled. ‘Do you mean slave girls?’

  If I accepted a holiday invitation to Al-Haziya, would I find I had changed my status?

  ‘Boys too.’ He shrugged. Since the atmosphere had become emotionally charged, for a while he let me make of the comment whatever I chose. Then he added, ‘And grown men. Actually, Ibrahim is one of my family’s slaves.’

  ‘Ibrahim!’

  Ibrahim was the prince’s personal bodyguard. A burly, impassive fellow, he hardly ever said a word in my hearing. Dab hand with a scimitar? Perhaps. In Britain he carried a pistol by special diplomatic dispensation. Ibrahim accompanied Bunny most places and dossed in Bunny’s rooms by agreement with the college. Certain terrorist groups such as the Jihad might aim for the future ruler of an oil-rich, pro-Western state. Ibrahim could have stopped the wrecking of Bunny’s room single-handed, at one flick of the prince’s finger. Bunny hadn’t flicked his finger.

  It was around this time that complexities began to dawn on me. Arabesque patterns.

  Originally Bunny and I bumped into each other -literally so – in the doorway of the PPE Reading Room, otherwise I would hardly have come into a prince’s orbit. Once in his orbit, I was to be an isolated satellite, well clear of the main cluster of the smart set. Bunny and I were definitely attracted to each other. Almost from the start an emotional gravity joined us, a serious yet playful friendship of approach and retreat which I’m sure packed in more true feeling and communication than he found with those other ‘friends’. I didn’t leap into bed with him, or even creep slowly, though I must admit I came close. I think I should have felt… overwhelmed, consumed, a moth landing in the heart of the flame instead of simply circling it.

  And the colours of this moth which so attracted the prince? (Moth, not butterfly.) My features, since I’ve described his? I prefer not to say. I’d rather stay anonymous and invisible. There are reasons. Linda may not even be my real name.

  So Bunny’s minder was a slave!

  ‘Surely,’ I remember saying, ‘while Ibrahim’s in Britain he could –’

  ‘Defect? Flee to freedom like some black slave escaping from Dixie to the north? He won’t. He owes loyalties.’

  Loyalties, plural. It dawned on me that whilst Ibrahim kept watch over Bunny with that eerie impassivity equally he was keeping watch on Bunny.

  I began to appreciate how there would be jealous, ambitious uncles and nephews and a host of sibling princes back home in Al-Haziya on whose behalf Ibrahim might be reporting – members’of the extended ruling family who might reward their informant at some future date with a prize more delicious than mere freedom, with the power to turn the tables, to make other people subject to him. It might be prudent for Bunny to let himself seem in Ibrahim’s eyes to be a frivolous figure, a corruptible emir-in-waiting who could easily be besotted or shoved aside when the time came.

  ‘Besides,’ added Bunny, ‘mightn’t your friendly British government deport Ibrahim back to Middle Eastern Dixie if he became an illegal visitor?’

  Here, if I guessed correctly, was the real reason why Bunny mixed with the smart set; or one strand of the explanation. Bunny was presenting himself to watchful eyes back home, to those eyes which watched through Ibrahim’s, as no force to be reckoned with when his father died. Prince Jafar was someone who would fritter wealth (without in any way diminishing it, so enormous was the pile!); someone who could amuse himself in Cannes or Biarritz or wherever was fashionable, thus ensuring that no great social changes would occur back home, only cosmetic ones. In their turn the terrorist Jihad might view him as a welcome heir. Compared with a playboy, a reforming ruler is definitely counter-revolutionary. The smart set was his camouflage. He didn’t court their access to power and privilege: he hardly need bother. What he courted was their élite impotence.

  I couldn’t help wondering whether Bunny had chosen of his own accord to come to Oxford to complete his education, or whether his father the Emir wanted him safely out of the way while internal struggles went on back home? Maybe the Emir had even advised Bunny to behave as he did? To survive, Bunny’s Dad must have been a clever man. Myself, I think that Bunny dreamed up his own chameleon strategy.

  Even the most dedicated master-spy becomes lonely at times, yearns to let the façade slip a little, to confide in a heart that beats in tune. Hence Bunny’s friendship with me. His attraction. His love? No… not exactly that.

  Quite soon we were zipping along the A40 towards Witney. Or Cheltenham; or Wales for all I knew. Behind us the sun was bright. The Cotswold hills and vales bulged and swooped green and gold, with pastures and corn: large perspectives to me, but to Bunny perhaps no more than a neat little parkland.

  Bunny’s car wasn’t your usual super-expensive sports convertible such as other members of the smart set were given by Daddy on their eighteenth birthdays. It was a Mercedes 190E 2.316V, a four-door hardtop performance job customized with bulletproof glass and armour. The extra weight reduced the top speed to a mere hundred-and-thirty miles an hour or so.

  ‘We’re going to Burford,’ he revealed.

  To the wild-life park?’ I’d been there on a school trip long ago. Rhino, red pandas, ostriches; a lunch of fish and chips in the caff. It’s a lovely wild-life park but I doubted that Bunny wanted to show me that.

  ‘No, we’re going to visit the church.’

  I laughed. ‘Have you been converted? Are we going to be married, shotgun-fashion?’

  The Merc overtook a trio of cars tailing a long container truck which itself must have been hammering along at seventy; we sailed by smoothly, brushing a hundred. In the role of royal chauffeur Ibrahim had been professionally trained in ambush avoidance. Bunny once had him demonstrate his skills for me on the grassy, cracked runway of a local disused airfield. Tricks such as using your hand-brake and wheel to spin a speeding car right round on its axis, and race off in the opposite direction.

  ‘Not quite converted. You could say that I’ve been… enhanced. Wait and see.’

  Burford is a bustling, picturesque little Cotswold town – or a big village depending on viewpoint. The broad high street plunges steeply downhill flanked by antique shops, art galleries, bookshops, tea rooms, elegant souvenir shops. Tourists flock to the place. Burford used to be a proud centre of the wool trade. Now the town is cashing in again, though it hasn’t vulgarized itself. As yet it hasn’t any waxworks museum of witchcraft, or candy floss.

  Presently we were drifting down that steep street. Near the bottom we turned off to the right along a lane. We drew up outside what I took to be former almshouses, close by the railings of the churchyard – paupers of old would have easy access to prayer and burial.

  Burford Church looked surprisingly large and long. It had evidently been extended at several times down the centuries, to judge by the different styles of windows. A spire soared from an original Norman tower which had visibly been concertinaed upwards. The main door was sheltered by a richly carved, three-storey porch worthy of any well-endowed Oxford college.

  Bunny and Ibrahim exchanged a few mutters in Arabic with the result that our chauffeur stayed with the car, to keep it warm. Unlikely that any agents of the Jihad would be lurking inside this Cotswold church on the offchance! (Yet something was lurking… waiting for Bunny.)

  A marmalade cat sunned itself on a tomb topped by a wool-bale carved from stone. I plucked a blade of grass and played with the cat briefly as we passed.

  The air inside the church was chilly. The huge building seemed well-monumented and well-chapeled but I wasn’t to have any chance to wander round. Bunny conducted me briskly over to the north side, through a line of pointed arches, and into a gloomy transept.

  And there stood the skeleton of a clock – taller than me, taller than Bunny. Stout stilts of legs supported a kind of aquarium fra
me filled with interlocking gears, toothed wheels, pinions, ratchets, drums, all quite inert. Two great pulleys dangled down with weights on long rods beneath each, like halves of a bar bell loaded with disc-weights. A motionless wooden pendulum rod a good eight feet long – with a big bob on the end – hung to within an inch or so of the floor.

  ‘Here we are!’ he exclaimed delightedly. ‘This used to be in the turret up above. A local chap by the name of Hercules Hastings built it in 1685.’

  I’ll admit the ancient clock was impressive in a crazy sort of way. But why had we come to see it?

  ‘So it’s a labour of Hercules, mm? With haste for a surname. You’ve got to be joking.’

  ‘No, it’s true, Linda. Of course the maker’s name did… cling to me, being so – what’s the word? – serendipitous. Such a beacon to any lover of Miss Christie, with her own Hercule!’ He took me by the arm, though not to lead me anywhere else. ‘I immediately studied all the spiel about this clock with as close attention as I would pay to a chapter full of clues in any of her mysteries.’

  He pointed at a long sheet of closely typed paper mounted in an old picture frame screwed to the wall nearby, in the dim shadows.

  ‘Messages exist in this world for us to find, dear Linda. Actually the whole world is a message. We Arabs know that very well. I do wish you spoke Arabic – so that you could read some of the mosques in my country. Yes, indeed, to read a building! Decoration and text mingle integrally upon the walls of our mosques. Architecture dissolves into ideas, ideas with more authentic substance than the faience or the brick. Our mosques exhibit ideas explicitly, Linda. They don’t just convey some vague notion of grandeur or the sublime as in your Western buildings, whose carved inscriptions are more like the sub-titles of a movie, crude caricatures of the actors’ flowing, living words.’

  Here was a depth of Bunny’s which was new to me. A mystical depth? No, not quite. As he continued to talk softly and raptly, still holding my arm, I understood that he was anxious I should understand how scientifically precise his Arab attitude seemed to him, and how inevitable it had been that Arabs preserved and extended science during the Dark Ages of Europe. Though alas, I couldn’t speak Arabic, so I could only take his words on trust.

  ‘Arabic, Linda, is a fluid, flexible, musical tongue whose script flows likewise, organically. What other script has so many alternative forms, all with the same meaning? What other script is so alive that it can be read overlayed or interlaced or even in reflection? No wonder Arabic is the only religious source language still equally alive today.’

  I thought of mentioning Hebrew, but decided not. After all, Hebrew had been virtually raised from the dead within living memory.

  ‘So what do we find here, Miss Marple?’

  ‘I’m a bit younger than her!’ I protested.

  ‘Oh you are, Linda. Yes you are. You’re freshly young. Refreshingly.’

  Bunny was young enough himself. Did I hear the jaded accents of someone who had already commanded the ‘favours’ of many experienced slave-women?

  ‘The message, Bunny,’ I reminded him. ‘The clues in the case of the clock, please.’

  The sheet wasn’t signed. The vicar may have typed it. Or the author may have been some technically-minded and pious parishioner who had assisted in the reconstruction of the turret clock. The machine had been dismantled as obsolete four decades before, and brought down from the tower to lie for years as a heap of junk. Fairly recently it had been rebuilt in the transept as an exhibition piece. Its bent parts had been straightened. Missing items were made up by hand. The clockwork had been demonstrated in action, but the machine wasn’t kept running.

  Exhibition piece? No, it was more. According to the densely typewritten page this clock was a working proof of the truth of religion.

  How many visitors to Burford Church bothered reading those lines attentively? Of those who did, how many people really took in all their, um, striking implications? These had certainly struck Bunny.

  This postDarwinian document described Hercules Hastings’ clock as a stage in the evolution between the original medieval clock and the contemporary electric clock which now roosted in the tower. According to the anonymous author the clock before us showed the manner in which the evolution of artefacts mirrored the evolution of animals and plants. Although the basic material -namely the brass and iron – did not change any more than DNA, protein, or cellulose changed, yet the form altered evolutionarily thanks to the ideas and decisions embodied in the metal. Well!

  Bunny read this sheet aloud to me with heavy emphasis as though it was some antique page spattered with bold type and capitals and italics.

  ‘The Basic Design – the interlocking gears, the slotted count wheel, the flail, the pair of rope drums – this stays the Same from one species of Clock to the next. Evolution occurs by jumps. After centuries of slow Improvement, suddenly with the Pendulum new species supersede old ones. This process is matched by Animals too.

  ‘(Listen to this, now): The Metal by itself has no power to evolve. It would be a wild and grotesque superstition to imagine that Iron and Brass could interact with their Environment to produce this Evolution. The Will and the Idea of the constructors is responsible. Why should the Evolution of Plants and Animals be different?

  ‘(And this:) The Turret Clock represents a humble form of Incarnation – of the Idea made Metal rather than Flesh. After the Death of the Clock on its removal from the tower it was by the Will and Intention of Mind that it was subsequently brought back into existence – in fact, resurrected.

  ‘Incredible stuff, isn’t it?’

  A final paragraph dealt with the harmonic motion of the pendulum compared with the wave motion of light and the bonding of atoms and molecules, the minute ‘brickettes of all materials’.

  I commented, ‘It sounds to me like a very old argument dragged creaking and groaning into the twentieth century. We once had a bishop called Paley –’

  ‘Who wound up his watch twice daily! In case it ran down – And stopped the whole town –’ Bunny couldn’t think of a last line. Even four-fifths of a limerick in a foreign language was pretty nifty, so I clapped (my free hand against my pinioned hand).

  ‘I know about Paley, Linda. But that doesn’t matter. The idea – embodied not merely in architecture but in machinery! What an Islamic concept.’

  ‘Ah,’ I interrupted brightly, ‘so you see yourself as the Godly constructor who will evolve your country and people by will and intention into the modern world, is that right? And here’s a religious argument in favour -because, because certain reactionary factions oppose this? They’d far rather keep the occasional Cadillac and oil-cracking plant surrounded by a sea of camel-dung?’

  ‘A sea of sand, dear. But wait – and thank you! I spy another useful metaphor. My country can be full of silicon … chips – if the will is applied to the sand. Now if I can persuade the old fogeys that –’

  It was then that it happened.

  It. The flash of lightning on the road to Damascus. The burning bush. The epiphany. The visionary event.

  It certainly wasn’t sunlight which shafted down to bathe the text in radiance and seem to alter it. The angle from any window was all wrong.

  Of a sudden the text inside the picture frame was flowing, glowing, blinding Arabic written in squiggles of fire. If I close my eyes, I can see it to this day. It inscribed itself on my brain even though I couldn’t read the meaning. But Bunny could. He stood transfixed.

  And then the pendulum started to swing. Wheels turned. Gears engaged. Ratchets clicked. The clock had resurrected itself of its own accord.

  Afterwards Bunny would say nothing about the contents of the message or what else he had experienced above and beyond the revival of the clock – which died again as soon as the Arabic words vanished; all this happened within a minute. It was as if he had been sworn to secrecy.

  He still took me to lunch, as promised, in the Golden Pheasant hotel up the High Street. I forge
t what I ate but I remember that Bunny had roast beef.

  I can’t even say with any certainty that he had changed. Since which was his true self?

  But I recall clearly one odd exchange we had during that meal. I realize now that he was giving me a clue to solve, an Agatha Christie clue which could have handed me the key to the message which had been imposed on him. At the time his remarks just seemed a bizarre flight of fancy, a way of tossing sand in my eyes to distract me.

  He remarked, ‘Doesn’t your Bible say, “So God created man in his own image”?’

  ‘As far as I remember.’

  He swivelled a slice of rare roast beef on his plate. At other tables American tourists were lunching, as well as a few British. Oak beams, old brass, old hunting prints.

  ‘In God’s own image, eh! Then why are we full of guts and organs? Does God have a brain and lungs and legs? Does His heart pump blood? Does His stomach digest meals in an acid slush?’

  I hoped he wasn’t committing some terrible Islamic sin along the lines of blasphemy.

  ‘I don’t suppose so,’ I said.

  ‘What if, in creating life, God was like some child or cargo-cultist making a model out of things that came to hand, things that looked vaguely right when put together, though they weren’t the real thing at all? Like an aeroplane made out of cardboard boxes and bits of string? But in this case, using sausages and offal and blood and bone stuffed into a bag of skin. Islam forbids the picturing of God, or of man, God’s image. Christianity encourages this picturing – everywhere. Which is wiser?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Doesn’t it hamstring artists, if you forbid the making of images?’

  ‘So it would seem to you because you don’t speak and think in Arabic –’

  ‘The language which makes ideas so solid and real?’ We seemed to be back on familiar territory. But Bunny veered.

  ‘If we made a robot in our own image, as a household slave, it still would not look like us inside. It would contain chips, magnetic bubbles, printed circuits, what-not. These days one sometimes fantasizes opening up a human being and finding cogs inside, and wires. What if you opened up a machine and discovered flesh and blood inside it? Veins and muscles? Which would be the model, which the image, which the original?’