But then one day, she detected wavelets crossing the face of a newly discovered pool and sensed the air movement that created them. She had felt no upset since the morning she’d exited M House, but here it was again as if the wind, a W word, was teasing and testing her.
She tore off her clothes and submerged herself in the pool to get away from its whispering. As she held her breath and watched ripples slip sideways above her, she remembered joyously slipping, on the edge of control, down the sliding slope. That edge was a place where she excelled, where she never fell. It was how she had known she could live My Experimental Life. She wouldn’t listen to fear’s taunts.
She splashed out of the pool, dressed and used her fingers to untangle her hair, much longer than it had ever been before. She steadied her heart and moved into the wind. Soon M.E.L. came upon, as she expected, air intake and exhaust vents that fitted precisely into the space between the world and the lower impermeable surface. Flaps of black polymer hung between the vents, sections just wide enough to squeeze through. She lay with an eye and an ear to the edge of a flap until her neck ached and one arm fell asleep. She saw no change of light levels or signs of movement, heard no sounds of work. She crawled through and stood up.
Here was a different kind of underworld, full of ducts and gauges, large storage units and computer screens and, to her right, a staff lounge like the one in M House. All of the floors were coated so that workers who monitored and maintained the invisible workings of P.P.A. had no view of, or contact with, the underworld she’d come to know.
M.E.L. searched the storage areas in the staff lounge until she found cases of nutrition packages. She lifted two of them off a shelf and returned to the flap she’d come through. She shoved the food boxes to the other side of the membrane.
The passageway in the opposite direction ended at a tall ladder beside an elevator. Use of the elevator might be detectable, she thought. So she looked way up the ladder and fought the urge to turn back, to stay safe. But she desired, so suddenly, so forcefully, to see the sky. And for the first time since she’d left her wrist computer behind, she was curious about her location on P.P.A. She climbed the countless rungs and pressed the door activator at the top.
She stepped onto the clean, flat surface, into a night glorious with stars. The door whooshed closed behind her. Her breath caught when she saw that where the doorway had been there was now only seamless polymer. M.E.L. searched for an external activator but found nothing. So she memorized her location in relation to the ventilation unit and tried to imagine how one might steal a worker’s remote control device.
The ventilator served a dormitory much like the one she’d lived in for thirteen years. Staying within the darkness of moon shadows, she approached the front entrance. W House, the sign read. She knew where she was— just across the artificial lake from M House. The way would be long, but she could make her way back to her tunnel over-surface. She figured the coordinates in her mind and suppressed any thoughts of being seen, being reported, being prevented from returning to her world, being sent to the D planet.
Then she heard what sounded like a bubbling spring, only sad, and she peered among the trees bordering the designated pathway to W House. There sat a boy, head drooped on his knees, foot coverings beside him. His shoulders shook, and his fists pounded perfect plastic.
M.E.L. spoke softly so as not to startle him. “You will be all right.” But he jumped and scuttled backward. She stepped into a patch of moonlight so he could see her better and pointed at her bare feet. “Look,” she said. “You will be all right.”
She took his hand and asked his call letters. “W.W.B.,” he said as he rose, tucking his foot coverings under one arm. She led him around the artificial lake, behind M House, and through the silk and silicone forest. His hand relaxed in hers as they journeyed through the night.
The moon set as they reached the warm grove, and the boy laughed, just as she once had, at the surprising sensation. They sat facing each other under the waving canopy, and the boy spoke for the first time all night. He told M.E.L. he couldn’t stand the teasing any more, that being a W was the worst witchy waste, that tonight he’d been locked out after arrival time, and that he couldn’t go back— for all these reasons and more. There was also the matter of his love for removing his foot coverings and wandering off designated pathways.
M.E.L. lay back and patted the warm surface beside her. When he’d settled there, she told him the story of finding this grove and of returning to it with provisions. She pointed up at the stars she had named and said that when light came in the morning, she would show him an incredible and beautiful W. She called him Wonderful World Boy.
Hours later, the sun touched their faces, waking them, and M.E.L. beckoned W.W.B. to the cluster of five trees that hid the entrance to the tunnel. The foliage seemed denser, greener than before, and she was, at first, frightened the hole had been discovered, sealed up and disguised with more silk trees. Then she gasped and her hands flew to her mouth. W.W.B. looked at her with a frown, expecting the worst.
She approached the stems and green leaves emerging from the tunnel, touched them, smelled them, trembled from head to foot. “These are growing things from the world,” she whispered, and W.W.B. touched them too. They discovered round fruits among the leaves that, when twisted, fell ripe and juicy into their hands. They ate until they were full.
“Come,” said M.E.L. “There is so much more to see.” She led the way into the downward sloping tunnel when, suddenly, W.W.B. said, “Wait.” She turned to see him staring intently at the long vine beside them. At first she saw nothing but then detected a slight prickle of movement, like what she saw behind her eyelids when she was dizzy from spinning fast down the slide slope. He looked at her round-eyed and smiling. “Bugs,” he said, although he didn’t know how he knew.
* * * * *
Dianne Homan was born in Englewood, NJ, across the river from the bustling-est city on earth. She now lives a world, and a continent, away in a log cabin off-grid in the wilderness outside Whitehorse, Yukon. She is an arts education advocate and enjoys nothing more than incorporating art, drama, music and dance in her work as a teacher and in her imaginings as a writer. Her stories and essays have appeared in anthologies and magazines, and she co-edited two volumes of Urban Coyote. The story, “M.E.L.”, is part of her current writing project called Mother Earth Legends.
The Calligrapher’s Daughter
Patricia Robertson
It was the fourth day of Ramadan and the calligrapher’s daughter sat, as she always did, with her qalams of sharpened reed, her inks of soot and copper sulphate bound with wine, her burnished paper. From the kitchen came her sisters’ chatter and the smell of harira, the dish that would break their fast that evening. As the youngest she ought to be among them, chopping and stirring, measuring and tasting, but the calligrapher’s daughter was exempt from such chores. From the age of two, when she had traced, with her finger, the whorls and flourishes of her father’s manuscripts, he had treated her as his apprentice. He taught her how to hold the pen, gave her scraps of paper on which to practise. “Look!” he had said then. “She is in love, as I was!” Her sisters muttered to each other about sorcery, enchantment, other dark spells. “She is the pearl of my old age,” their father answered. And when people said Lesou alhaz, what a misfortune, the calligrapher has only daughters, he replied, “Allah, praise be unto Him, has consoled me with a daughter with talent.”
At seven the calligrapher’s daughter was writing letters for her neighbors. At twelve she began transcribing her first Qur’an. At fourteen she received her first commission: a suite of poems by the magnificent fourteenth-century Grenadine poet Ibn al-Khatib, to be transcribed on gazelle’s vellum and presented as a wedding gift from a Fez princeling to his bride. When not working she spent hours in her father’s library, which held a Qur’an that was said to have once belonged to the grea
t Baghdad scholar Ya‘qūb ibn Ishāq al-Kindī. Its pages were stained with salt and ocean spray, its binding frayed, but merely to hold it, or so the calligrapher’s daughter believed, was to feel inspiration from the Divine Radiance flowing into one’s fingers. Its anonymous creator, whoever she was — for the calligrapher’s daughter was certain it was a woman — deserved, of course, no credit, as her father had long ago taught her. All credit belonged to Allah, who had sent the Qur’an to humankind as a talisman of the Hidden Book known only to the Lord of the Worlds Himself. For, as the Qur’an said: If all the trees in the earth were pens, and if the sea eked out by seven seas more were ink, the Words of God could not be written out to the end.
Now, on the fourth day of Ramadan, the calligrapher’s daughter was beginning the most important commission she had ever undertaken, that of a Qur’an for the Sultan himself. It was to be a gift from the grand vizier of the court, to be presented three months hence on the fifth anniversary of the Sultan’s victory over the Portuguese at the battle of Ksar El Kebir, when he had vanquished five hundred ships and eighteen thousand men, with nine thousand dead and the rest taken prisoner. An almost impossible period of time in which to complete the work, yet it was difficult to concentrate with her stomach gurgling from hunger. The calligrapher’s daughter picked up one of her pens, dipped it into the pot of gold ink, and began drawing an arabesque within one of the shamsahs, the little suns that illuminated the margins. While she worked it was as though her father sat beside her, guiding her hand, murmuring instructions about the pressure of the pen, the angle of the nib, the purity of the letters. “Handwriting,” he had told her when she was still small, “is jewelry by the hand from the pure gold of the intellect. It is also brocade woven by the reed pen with the thread of understanding.” He himself was too old, now, to do the work — his hand shook, his sight had dimmed — but every day he came to inspect her own, to hold it up against the light that entered through the narrow window. “Yes, daughter, here on this page you have achieved perfection,” he would say. “The perfection, that is, that Allah allows us to claim, though all our work is imperfect compared to His.” Sometimes he took a pen and deliberately marred one of the still-wet letters, making her cry out— she couldn’t help it. “Perfection is for Allah only,” he always said. “Let us remain humble by never forgetting.”
“Handwriting may be jewelry and brocade,” her sister Sa’aida said, “but when the time comes I want my wedding dress woven of real silk, not words. Even if they are from the Qur’an.” A statement that had scandalized everyone else, though the calligrapher’s daughter merely smiled. Wedding dresses, no matter how finely woven, fell apart, but the words of the Qur’an lasted forever.
At sunset every day the calligrapher’s daughter laid aside her pens and joined her family for the evening meal. The others laughed, recounted the latest gossip, teased each other, but the calligrapher’s daughter sat silent, filled with the words she had been transcribing. “Another serving, sister?” her eldest sister said, and added mockingly, “Even you cannot live on words alone.”
Afterwards the calligrapher’s daughter returned to her table and worked by lamplight far into the night. Her father cautioned her against spoiling her eyes, but the truth was she had no choice if she was to complete the task in the time allowed. She prayed for a steady hand and a pure heart. One could not rush, especially when transcribing the very words that the Prophet himself had uttered, peace be upon him. Still, human deadlines — and especially those of a sultan — had also to be respected. Besides, the household depended on her earnings, now that her oldest sister was a widow and the husband of the second oldest was ill. Apart from her four sisters and three brothers-in-law there were eight grandchildren, the youngest a mere few weeks old. She had a feeling about this youngest, a girl named Maryam after her grandmother. The calligrapher’s daughter could already see, in the baby’s fat fingers, the potential for holding a qalam as though she had been born for nothing else.
On the nineteenth day of Ramadan, after sunset, the grand vizier himself paid a call. His arrival sent all the women into a frenzy of preparation. Tea must be made and served in the ornate pot kept for special guests, sweetmeats chosen and set out on a tray, the vizier’s horse stabled, his servants given something to eat. The calligrapher’s daughter heard all the commotion outside but paid no attention. She had long ago learned to resist the temptation of the streets. She continued working steadily even when the grand vizier entered the room, accompanied by her father leaning on his staff.
“No, no,” the grand vizier said as her father, scandalized, urged her to cover her face and rise. “I see she is hard at work, and the deadline is short.” He bent over the table and scrutinized the page she was working on, where the heading of Surah 68, The Pen, was enclosed in a glowing rectangle of gold, crimson, and blue. “Magnificent,” he murmured. “Truly, you are guided by the hand of Allah, as Zayd ibn Thabit himself must have been.”
There was no greater compliment than to be compared to the Scribe of the Prophet. The calligrapher’s daughter bowed her head as her father said, “Really, your honour, you are too kind, much too kind. My daughter is young still, she has not come into her full powers, she—”
“Then she will astound the world when she does,” the grand vizier said sharply, and turned on his heel. At the door he said, “An extra hundred gold benduqi if you can complete it a week early. I should like to have it displayed at the palace for all to see.”
“An extra hundred benduqi!” her father muttered after the vizier was gone. “The man cannot be a true Muslim to speak so. Perhaps he is a convert.”
The calligrapher’s daughter said nothing, but a quiet pride filled her. She must be careful, she knew, not to let such praise go to her head. Still, it was gratifying to receive such approval when she was still young enough to savor the sweetness. Her father had been well into middle age before receiving his rightful due for his skills. “What a shame,” one of her sisters had said then, “that Allah sends almonds to those without teeth.”
The completed Qur’an was indeed delivered early to the vizier. It was presented to the Sultan in an elaborate ceremony, to which the calligrapher’s daughter, as a woman, was not invited. The next day it was displayed on a silk cushion on a marble table in one of the visiting rooms of the palace, and thousands lined up to see it. A messenger in a glittering turban arrived on horseback at the calligrapher’s house, bearing a purse with one hundred benduqi in it in addition to the fee the calligrapher’s daughter had already been promised. She gave the money to her father for distribution to the household, retaining for herself only enough to buy new pens and more copper sulphate.
A week later another messenger arrived. He bore a scroll with the Sultan’s seal on it, addressed to the calligrapher’s daughter herself, commanding her to appear at the palace after Friday prayers. The calligrapher’s daughter re-rolled the scroll with trembling fingers. What was the purpose of this command, addressed to her, a mere scribe, and a woman at that? Had her work displeased the Sultan after all? He was known to be capricious, mercurial, someone who did not suffer fools gladly. The palace, so it was said, held three hundred and fifty rooms, lavishly decorated with ivory, gems, and cedar wood, a pool made of Italian marble and gold, and vast gardens where fountains played. And also an underground tunnel leading to a jail where thousands of prisoners were held captive.
On Friday a troop of the Sultan’s own royal guard arrived to escort her to the palace. Her sisters, who had helped choose the kaftan she was to wear, trilled and fluttered, but the calligrapher’s daughter thought only of how she might never see them again. She squeezed little Maryam tightly and bent low over her father’s hand. “A great honour, my daughter,” her father murmured, though she thought she caught a flicker of anxiety in his voice. She took with her her pens and inks and paper, in case his majesty commanded her to write something there and then.
At t
he palace she was led through room after room, each more dazzling than the last. She was almost dizzy with its splendors when she was shown into a small alcove hidden behind a plain curtain. There, seated on a cushion on the floor, was a man dressed in a simple brown djellaba, a Qur’an open in front of him on a cushion. Could this really be the Sultan? He motioned her to a low stool nearby. The calligrapher’s daughter sank onto it, trembling.
“I come here daily,” the Sultan told her, “to remind myself that I am a mere servant of Allah, like other mortals, though I rule a sultanate and own five thousand slaves. I come to be reminded of The Knower of All, Whose mysteries have no end. And the first mystery is this: Why did The Hidden One give such power as you possess to a woman?”
“Your Majesty,” the calligrapher’s daughter stammered, but the Sultan waved a hand.
“Of course you do not know. Only The Knower knows. Then tell me this: Why is it that the Qur’an you prepared, all honour be to The Glorious One, dazzles me so much I cannot look at it?”
Again the calligrapher’s daughter found herself stammering.
“I keep it on a lectern by my bed,” the Sultan went on. “And when I wake in the night, it glows with a strange light, and the letters blaze like letters of fire. Who taught you such craft?”
The calligrapher’s daughter stared at him, unable to answer. The pages of this Qur’an, in her own humble estimation, were certainly the most beautiful she had ever created, blasphemy though it might be to think so, yet in her own hands they had never glowed and blazed in the way the Sultan described. “Perhaps, she finally murmured, “what you are seeing is a pale reflection of the Light Itself, Your Majesty.”
The Sultan was silent for a long time. “Last night,” he said slowly, “this is the surah that blazed out at me: ‘If someone kills another person — unless in retaliation for someone else or for causing corruption in the earth — it is as if he had murdered all mankind. And if anyone gives life to another person, it is as if he had given life to all mankind.’” The Sultan raised his eyes. “Tell me, was it you who arranged that this surah should be emphasized above all others?”
Tesseracts Seventeen Page 31