“Yes, I hate many things about Islam—I hate any religion that clouds in any way the reason of men. And I had no use for that pompous Aziz—I had the pleasure of spending two uninterrupted days in his exclusive braying company our first trip out here—”
“That’s what I was thinking of,” Jakob said.
“But I didn’t kill him, you understand? I’m a zoologist, a philosopher—I study life, however revolting. I don’t kill it! I kill stupid ideas, instead. I seek out errors, and try to kill them—not the people who make them.”
“Well, then, who?” Jakob asked. “Why would the Vascones kill just one of us? As part of their ceremony? And then what, they let the rest of us go on our merry way? I don’t believe that—”
Gwellyn burst in to the dwelling—looking for Paschos, surprised to see Jakob.
“Come,” Gwellyn shouted. “There’s fire in the hills.”
THEY CAUGHT UP with Ibrim at the entrance to the cave. It looked very different in the thick grey smoke pouring out of its mouth, and the daylight pouring out of the sky. A line of ten Vascone men stood between Ibrim and the cave.
Gwellyn noticed that Ibrim’s eyes were tearing, presumably from the acrid smoke.
“They’re destroying all the pictures within—” Ibrim began.
“I can see that,” Gwellyn said. He made a move towards the Vascone men. Paschos and Ibrim restrained him.
“It’s no use,” Ibrim said. “This has been going on for hours—since before sunrise. It’s all gone inside.”
“Why?” Gwellyn demanded.
Ibrim shook his head. “These people—these Vascones—practice a very ancient religion, from what I can tell. Goes back before Mohammet, before Christ, before Moses and Abraham himself, for all I know.” His eyes turned from Paschos to Jakob.
“My religion goes back a long way too,” Gwellyn said.
“I know,” Ibrim said. “And these people are very protective of their religion, as I’m sure your people are. Most of the Vascones are already Christian. Some may soon be Islamic, if my people have their way. But these people, of this village—they’re worried, they see bad omens in every event. And they saw what happened last night to Aziz as a very bad omen—so they seek to protect themselves against that omen by destroying the vessel that brought it to them. They say their lamps knew it, and erupted on their own to destroy the vessel—the sacred cave—that Aziz’s death had profaned.”
“Just what you were trying to prevent, wasn’t it?” Paschos said.
Ibrim looked at Paschos, then nodded.
“What do you mean?” Gwellyn asked Ibrim. “You knew that the Vascones planned to sacrifice Aziz to their—their singer gods—you knew that they would then seek to destroy the realm of that sacrifice, to cleanse the place of that murder, and you tried to prevent it? How could you know that?”
Ibrim said nothing.
“No,” Paschos said. “I don’t think that’s how it happened.”
“How then?” Gwellyn turned to face Paschos, as did Jakob. Ibrim turned away.
Finally, Ibrim spoke. “Not all followers of the Prophet are alike,” he said slowly. “Some see our most profound teachings and our most casual inclinations as one and the same—they think all must be followed with equal severity, with no room for change.”
“Aziz was like that,” Jakob said.
“Aziz believed, as all of us who follow the Prophet do, that pictures of the Prophet are a sacrilege. Aziz also believed, as some of us do, that pictures of anything profound are a sacrilege. He found the pictures last night very profound…”
“Islam destroys what it believes to be sacrilege,” Paschos said.
“Most religions do that,” Jakob said.
“He told me last night,” Ibrim continued, “while we watched the singers butchered on the walls—come to life again and then butchered—he told me no one should ever see this, or anything like it again. Imagine, as I watched this on the walls, watched what probably no one from my people had ever seen before, watched what we have travelled years now to learn more about—imagine that as I see that, I hear as accompaniment Aziz hissing in my ear about how all of this must be erased, and as soon as possible. How he would torch this, and every cave like this he could track down in these hills. How once Islam had converted this area, had made it see the light of Allah, how he, Aziz, would make it his personal mission to destroy every trace of this moving picture obscenity, this light that mimicked life, this outrage…”
More smoke billowed out of the cave. More people arrived. More butterflies flew to the skies…
“So I killed him,” Ibrim said. “I killed him, to protect this—I slashed his stupid throat, my brother’s throat, may Allah forgive me, with my knife. To protect all of this.” He waved his hand at the cave, the smoke. “But now look at this—look what I’ve done…”
No one said a thing.
“Perhaps there are other caves like this, with other stories of the singers,” Gwellyn said.
“Perhaps,” Ibrim said. “But we’ll never find them—the Vascones killed our guide, the one with the flute, this morning. They said the flute had called forth the killers from the walls, and into our world—”
“Called forth the killers of the singers,” Gwellyn said. And he saw again that one singer, the first singer on the walls, the one who survived, and that look in his eyes…
“We might yet find another cave with pictures,” Jakob said.
“How? Where?” Gwellyn asked.
“I know where Mitxeleta is. She’s still alive.”
SIX
BASQUE LANDS, CIRCA A.D. 753
The hills reeked of smoke for a long time.
Just looking at them, even from afar, made Gwellyn’s eyes smart.
“They’re burning out every cave they know that has pictures, aren’t they,” Gwellyn observed.
“They say: ‘Our lamps are purifying the chambers,’” Jakob intoned.
Gwellyn scoffed.
“It’s the way of humanity,” Jakob said. “Burn, purify, what you don’t understand. It’s the same thing. Better that than you keep it, even though it disturbs you, so that God forbid you might learn something from it someday.”
“You’re getting cynical in your old age,” Ibrim said.
“They’re burning the moving pictures of the singers, just like we burned their bones—my brother Allyn and I,” Gwellyn said.
Paschos approached the three men. “She’s ready,” he said. “But she’s stubborn. Only the two of you,” he pointed to Gwellyn and Jakob, “can accompany her. Ibrim and I must stay back here.”
Jakob nodded. “She doesn’t trust Ibrim after what happened to Aziz—the Vascone with the flute saw it all. He confessed what he witnessed, before he died. And she doesn’t trust Ibrim left alone with her people. That’s why Paschos must stay.”
“I was trying to safeguard those pictures,” Ibrim said, ruefully.
“I know,” Jakob said.
“Perhaps my brothers are right after all that nothing good ever comes of pictures that mimic life…”
“We’ll be fine back here,” Paschos said. “I would have liked to get another look at those pictures, though—Mitxeleta says the ones she’ll be taking you to see are the very last of that kind, with singers. Well, maybe later on, when these fires are more a memory than such a stink in the air…”
“Yes, I’m sure there will be another time for you to see the pictures,” Jakob lied, and Paschos knew he was lying, and the two men hugged. And then everyone hugged each other, except Paschos and Ibrim, who waved goodbye to Jakob and Gwellyn, who walked off into the hills to collect Mitxeleta.
“There’s something important you’ll want to know, and I did not tell you,” Jakob said, when Paschos and Ibrim were well out of sight. “I was afraid they might have insisted on coming with us if they knew.”
“Yes? What is it?” Gwellyn said.
“Well, I can’t be sure, of course…”
“Yes?”
“Mitxeleta says it’s more than the last cave with pictures she’s taking us to. That’s why she trusts us with this—she says I’m too old to do any harm, and she likes the prism of your eyes…”
“I’m pleased,” Gwellyn said. “But what’s this about?”
“She says in this cave, unlike any of the others, the singers come off of the walls and the ceiling and join us in the climax of the ceremony. There’s always this problem with language and translation, but I think she may be saying that, in this cave, the singers are actually still alive…”
GWELLYN, JAKOB, AND Mitxeleta proceeded on horses—black, gentle, and surefooted—up into the mountains, east and north.
“Such lushness and coolness in one place!” Jakob said. “The air is sweet enough to sip.”
“Yes, it’s very different here from the Mediterranean,” Gwellyn said. “Greenness, sunshine all around, the last days of August, and we’re barely sweating.”
Mitxeleta smiled, though she understood not a word of the Tocharian they were speaking.
Gwellyn thought she was smiling at the beauty of the mountains and the forests and the sunlight.
“Where are the lamps?” he suddenly asked her, in the variant of Latin they were both able to somewhat speak. Their leaving had been so hurried that he hadn’t noticed them missing until now.
“The light will be there for us when we arrive.”
“Ah, like the new flute player?”
“There will be many flute players where we are going.”
Gwellyn looked at her quizzically. For some reason, he had assumed that the flutes were as rare in the singers’ lives as they were in their deaths. “The singers make many flutes?”
Perhaps Gwellyn had not learned enough of the Latin dialect to communicate as clearly as he wished. Or perhaps Mitxeleta was one of those people, common in every place Gwellyn had ever conducted a conversation, who seemed to answer questions with pre-set passages, as if the question elicited a small codex of information already wrapped up somewhere in the head. “Legend says that wolves made the first flutes,” she said.
“Wolves?”
“Yes,” she had said. “A dying wolf bit into a bone, desperate for food. The marrow had already been sucked dry from the bone, so it gave the wolf no sustenance, and it died. But the teeth of the hungry, dying wolf made holes in the hollow bone. A singer picked it up, blew into it, tried to measure the holes with the tips of his fingers… And the singer found the flute had preserved the soul of the wolf, could recall its cry…”
“Sometimes that flute music does remind me of a wolf’s dying howl,” Jakob observed.
“It does,” Gwellyn agreed. Perhaps Mitxeleta had understood his question, perfectly, after all.
Now she stopped by a small piece of frothy, fast-flowing stream, barely visible as it rushed from one lichen-covered promontory to another. She pointed at the stream, and talked again of the singers.
“Their lives are short and fast, like that stream. Most of them live no longer than thirty of our years.”
“Many of us live no longer than 30 either,” Jakob said. “I’m just a lucky exception.”
“That’s because we do not care for ourselves—we ignore what our bodies tell us,” Mitxeleta said. “For the singers, there are far fewer exceptions. Whatever they do, their bodies give out. That is why music and memory are so important to them. They live through music and memory.”
“Do they hate us?” Gwellyn said. “We killed them whatever their age, according to those pictures. There were children on that wall.”
“We didn’t kill all of them,” Mitxeleta said. “We can never kill all of them—that cannot be.”
“Why not?” Gwellyn asked.
“You’ll see.”
THEY REACHED WALKING distance to the cave five days later.
“The rest is too narrow even for these wonderful animals,” Mitxeleta said.
Gwellyn looked up at the path beyond, and agreed. “Will the horses be here when we return?”
“If not them, others like them,” Mitxeleta replied.
Gwellyn looked at Jakob, who shrugged.
“We came this far; Adonai will provide!” Jakob said.
“What, you’re suddenly finding religion now?”
Jakob smiled. “Under the circumstances, I’ll take whatever I can get.”
Gwellyn shook his head. “Can he make the climb?” he asked Mitxeleta about Jakob.
“Adonai,” she said, and laughed.
“Great, you have a convert here,” Gwellyn said to Jakob. “All right, I guess we’ll just walk slowly, and stop whenever you need to. At least the walk back down will be easier.”
“Actually, at my age, walking up is sometimes easier than walking down,” Jakob said.
Their dinner was an ibex Gwellyn had hunted in the morning, and tubers Mitxeleta had unearthed in the afternoon. “A little stringy, but good,” Jakob said about the ibex, which Mitxeleta had quartered and he had roasted over a small fire. All agreed that the tubers were delectable.
They began their climb at sunrise. The leaves overhead sliced the light into bright shifting packets. “If Paschos were here, he’d say those medleys of leaves were better than the stained glass windows of Byzantium, and he’d be right,” Jakob said.
They climbed for two days. Mitxeleta had extended the edibility of the ibex meat by applying salt she had long ago recovered from the sea, and the tubers tasted even sweeter than they had on the day they were unearthed…
On the third afternoon, Mitxeleta stopped, and looked carefully at some shrubbery.
She did that two more times.
The fourth time, she not only inspected the shrubbery, but pushed her way through it, and motioned Gwellyn and Jakob to do the same.
“I have to bend again,” Jakob muttered.
The other side of the shrubbery opened onto a small clearing, with grass as high as their knees.
“Looks like a grain of some kind,” Gwellyn said.
But Jakob tugged on Gwellyn’s arm, and pointed to a rock formation, perhaps an entrance to a cave, on the far side of the clearing.
Two figures appeared in front of it.
Gwellyn squinted, but couldn’t make them out.
Mitxeleta saw them too, and gestured to Gwellyn and Jakob that they should stay still. She walked quickly towards the two figures, arms outstretched. She made a high-pitched sound with her voice, oddly soothing.
“Like Christ on the cross,” Jakob said in his loud whisper.
Gwellyn tried to bring the two figures into clearer focus. Were they singers? The flickering light in the cave with the moving pictures had not been strong enough for him to see precisely what they looked like… Somehow the sunlight and shadow, at least at this distance, was even worse…
He scrutinized the two in front of the rock formation. Mitxeleta reached them. And appeared to disrobe—
Gwellyn started to move, but Jakob restrained him.
“She’s probably just showing them that she has no weapons,” Jakob rasped.
Gwellyn nodded, and relented a bit. “Are those singers?”
“I don’t know,” Jakob said.
“She said the singers would come off the cave walls—those are outside.”
“So maybe she was wrong about that detail,” Jakob said.
“I can’t see Mitxeleta at all now,” Gwellyn said. “We can’t just stand here.”
Jakob hesitated. “OK, let’s move forward, slowly… No, wait! Ah! There she is!”
Mitxeleta was visible again, fully clothed. She started walking back towards them.
Gwellyn kept his eyes on the two other figures, as if looking at them steadily would prevent them from leaving.
Mitxeleta approached. She looked intense, yet calm. “You see what I just did? You walk towards them the same way—arms outstretched.” She extended her arms again, palms up, horizontal to the ground.
“Do we make the same noise too?” Gwellyn asked.
> Mitxeleta glared at him. “If you’re making a joke, this isn’t the time. If your question is serious, then do not worry, I will see to the greeting.”
“I was serious,” Gwellyn said. “I just did not know your word for musical greeting.”
“You will have to take your clothes off too.”
“OK,” Gwellyn said. “Do we put them on again before we enter the cave?”
“We won’t be entering the cave,” Mitxeleta said. “They won’t allow any of us to enter their caves, after the killing and the fires below. Those two were put there to guard the cave.”
“They know about Aziz?”
“Yes, the hills have eyes and wings,” Mitxeleta said. “The singers have butterflies. My name means butterfly.”
THE SINGERS WERE about five and one-half feet tall, shorter than Gwellyn, but just about Jakob’s height. Their skin was a dark ochre—reminiscent to Gwellyn of the complexions he had once seen on some travellers who had come to the Tarim Basin from Mongolia, but not quite that shade either. Their brows protruded, but they did not look as brutish as their skeletons suggested, assuming those were skeletons of the same race. Something about the way their skin rode upon their faces, the way their eyes, keen and musty green, moved inside their sockets when they regarded Gwellyn, made them seem serenely intelligent—the complete opposite of anything brutish or less than human.
They look like children, Gwellyn realized, and mentioned this to Jakob.
“Yes, I see what you mean,” Jakob said. “There is a theory—I heard Paschos talk about it once—that human beings are more intelligent than the beasts because we maintain our childhood longer, and thus extend our time to learn.”
“These look like children only in their faces,” Gwellyn said, as he and Jakob put their clothes back on. The singers had penises which, even in their flaccid state, were half again as long and thick as Gwellyn’s and Jakob’s. The only clothes the singers wore were animal skins of some sort draped part way over their shoulders. That couldn’t have been enough to keep them warm—but given the temperature, that would not have been a necessity, and Gwellyn concluded that the function of the skins was ceremonial, perhaps to identify these two singers as guardians of the cave.
The Silk Code Page 11