by Saad Hossain
32: INTERVIEW WITH A LION
DAGR WAS HAVING TEA WITH THE LION. IT WASN’T A PLEASANT experience. The man was frightening. His face was seamed with old scars, the ragged edged ones from fighting, but also scalpel straight ones from countless operations. They formed a cross-hatched seam across his head and neck, a chess board of pain and humiliation. And his eyes—his eyes were old. Weary. Clouded with despair. There was something otherworldly in them but not of the cute fairy variety. This kind of elfin spoke of madness, of eerie darkness and the depths to which the world was deeply fucked up beyond the small patina of normality that coated most lives and the very long way a man could fall once he plunged through this meager safety net. Dagr thought back on the fantastic tale of the watch and shuddered.
“Your friends, they are well?” Afzal Taha’s voice was damaged, a bare whisper of force.
“They will recover,” Dagr said. They’re half dead. Kinza is halfway in a coma. They gave me all the armor, and then paid the price. “Thanks for the doctor.” The Lion had moved them to a different place, a house with actual beds and some form of hygiene. The doctor brought them hot food and looked after their injuries with a dedication that went beyond payment.
“He owes me,” the Lion said.
“Well, you’ve probably saved Kinza’s life,” Dagr said. “Sorry, by the way, about shooting you. That episode didn’t turn out so well for us. The neighborhood people told us you were a murderer.”
“I am.”
“Oh well,” Dagr tried to keep his grin fixed in place, “who isn’t, these days. They turned on us though, sold us to Hassan Salemi.”
“They tend to do that.”
“So it’s very kind of you, really, to come back like this. I thought you would be more interested in shooting us, to be honest.”
“The thought had crossed my mind,” Afzal Taha said. “But the situation is fluid.”
“I see.”
“There is a way for us to live,” Taha said. “All of us.”
“I am a bit confused.”
“The watch.”
“I have it,” Dagr almost tripped himself in his eagerness to get it out. “See, safe. I knew you’d want it back.”
“Keep it.” Taha waved his hand.
Dagr had expected a bullet by this time, the doctor notwithstanding, and his subsequent observations on this man’s stability had done nothing to bolster any hopes to the contrary. Thus, with exaggerated care, he put the watch down on the tea table between them in a place he hoped sufficed as middle ground where he wouldn’t be accused of disobeying a direct order to ‘keep it’ while at the same time making it abundantly clear that the object, in fact, did not belong to him and he was most willing to return it. This bit of mental weaselly left him feeling slightly soiled. With nothing left to do, he sat back and drank his tea.
“You have been fighting Salemi. What do you know of him?”
“Fanatic?” Dagr asked. “Not a man to be crossed? We killed his son by accident. I have never expected to come out of this alive after that night. In a way, it’s a relief that you have found us.”
“I am not proposing to kill you right now.”
“Thanks.”
“Provided you help me.”
“Yesterday we attacked Salemi’s fortress, just the three of us. We killed all his men. It was the most horrific thing I have ever seen in my life. My partners are injured grievously. We have no money, no more bullets, no more friends or connections. And I freely admit that I am the most useless of our trinity. Right now, I’ll do whatever you say.”
“You are wrong,” the Lion said.
“What?”
“You have one friend.”
“Eh?”
“An American named Hoffman,” Afzal Taha said. “He has been trying to help you.”
“He’s still alive?”
“Yes, most likely,” Taha said. “Americans do not die so easily in Baghdad.”
“And helping us? How? I swear, we have neither heard nor seen him since we left our house.”
“Nevertheless, he has been trying to help you,” Taha said. “Tell me, is he mentally deficient in any way?”
“What?”
“Is he retarded?”
“No. Well, not really. He’s very clever in his own way.”
“I ask because in trying to help you, he has brought down upon you the enmity of a most dangerous man,” Taha said.
“I have no idea about this.”
“It all comes down to the watch,” Taha said. “When you took the watch, you changed the trajectory of your life in a radical way.”
“I have some ideas about the watch.”
“It is a bauble,” Taha said. “Sought by some very powerful men. When you took it from me and escaped, you started a chain of events. Hoffman followed you and learned some things about the watch. He understood—perhaps in his cunning way—that it was valuable beyond the sum of its parts. He made enquiries, particularly among members of the retired Mukhabarat. A very foolish thing to do, for The Enemy knows everything of the Mukhabarat, indeed, that organization was first founded by him.”
“Then what happened?”
“The Enemy met Hoffman, and recruited him. The Enemy effects the disguise of a harmless old man. He probably promised to help Hoffman, help all of you, in return for the watch, or some such nonsense.”
“He was not helping us or Hoffman then?” Dagr tried to follow.
“No. For the past few weeks, agents of The Enemy have been scouring the streets looking for you. And he found you. He found Hassan Salemi. He found your poor dead friend Xervish, who lies in pieces.”
“I see. He wants the watch?”
“Yes. He has been working on a project, which has two missing pieces: the watch and myself. I will get back to the bigger story. For your part, The Enemy approached Salemi and recruited him. With what promises and threats I do not know, but rest assured that The Enemy is much more resourceful than a hundred Salemis. Salemi was to kill you, that was his reward, vengeance for the slaughter of his son. The Enemy would get the watch. Accordingly, Salemi received the location of the safehouse. Everything was in place.”
“Except we left,” Dagr said slowly.
“Yes, you did something crazy. You attacked Salemi, threw his organization into disarray,” the Lion said. “And then you did not return to the safehouse. Had you done so, you would be dead now. Because as of this morning, that house no longer exists. It has been blown to bits, with no survivors. There were priceless things in there. The destruction of the Great Library is finally complete.”
Dagr slumped back in his chair. Tears sprung up unbidden to his eyes. He felt his face redden. There was no dignified way for a grown man to cry that he knew of, so he just wiped his face with his sleeves a number of times and sniffed loudly.
“Meanwhile, The Enemy was using your friend Hoffman for a different task: to find me.”
“I see.”
“And now his time is up. If he is still alive, he will not be for long.”
“You see, The Enemy knows I am here, somewhere in this part of the city, and his net is closing in. Time is his friend, and he will win sooner or later. He will find both of us, singly or together, and then it will be over.”
“So there is no hope for any of us?”
“Well, you see, I have been running from this man my entire life,” the Lion said. “And it has never done me much good. But now I have a better idea.”
“What?”
“When your friend decided to attack Salemi, the depth of his madness gave me hope.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He showed me a way. When running avails nothing, the only option is to attack.”
“Attack what? I don’t understand.”
“Attack The Enemy. He is a thousand times better protected than Salemi. His security has been built layer by layer, neighborhood by neighborhood over hundreds of years, literally. Yet in all this accretion of power, he has n
ever been tested. We will surprise him. To tell the truth, I’m tired. I have nothing left. This might be my last attempt. I wish to make a decent effort.”
“You want to attack this man who orders Salemi around?” Dagr was aghast. “This man who set up the Mukhabarat?”
“Yes,” the Lion said. “Your real enemy is not Salemi, it is the Old Man of the Mukhabarat, known as Avicenna, Ibn Sina, the Alchemist, and by a hundred other names. He wants you dead and me captured. I am not here to kill you. I want to join you.”
Dagr stifled an urge to laugh. You should have been speaking to Kinza. He’s going to love this.
“What do you say?” the Lion asked.
Dagr spread his hands out. “Well, of course I agree.”
“Listen, then, to my tale,” the Lion said. “It is incredible, but true.”
33: LION’S STORY
“THE STORY STARTS OVER A THOUSAND YEARS AGO, SOMETIME IN the eighth century of the Gregorian calendar. It is really the story of alchemy. Well, it starts even earlier than that, with the Greeks and the Egyptians, but then everything for us starts there. My story is the story of Jabber Ibn Hayyan, known to the Latin world as Geber. I have heard much of the story directly from him. Some other details were given to me by his contemporaries, and some secrets were entrusted to me by my master, of whom I will speak later.
“Young Geber was born into an affluent family in Persia. His father was an alchemist of some renown, not in the Egyptian or Greek schools, which were based on mystical rites but rather, something new, following the principles of experimentation and logic. Geber himself told me that he received his schooling in his father’s shop from the age of 3, at first simply learning the names of each ingredient, but later actively mixing and measuring them.
“Geber was a polymath. He could read and write at 4. His family moved around a lot. I am not sure, but I get the feeling that his father was a member of some hermetic brotherhood. They were by nature a profession rife with secret societies.
“At the age of 13, Geber was sent to Kufa to study with his uncle. Not a blood relative, but a friend of his father’s I imagine. Geber was a modest man but I understand that by this time he had outstripped his father in knowledge and application, and moreover his grasp of mathematics was already beyond most of the Persian masters in Khorsaon. In Kufa, he received further esoteric knowledge in alchemy. He was inducted into the brotherhood of the golden ram, a lineage of mystics stretching all the way back to ancient Egypt. He travelled for a time with an unknown master, whose name he did not reveal even to me. I suspect he toured the old worlds of Egypt, Greece, and India. He kept this part of his life secret, even from his closest friends, with good reason perhaps.
“I have heard that when he returned he was a changed man, harder, colder, struggling under some burden. His master did not return with him. There was rumor of murder. He would struggle under this stigma for many years, although I think that he was probably incapable of such an act. Life to him was sacrosanct, above all else, even service to God. Whatever happened to him in those years is a mystery, and it transformed his character greatly.
“Thereafter, he became obsessed with Tawkin: the creation of life. It is commonly believed that all we care about is turning lead into gold. This is a misconception, perhaps deliberately fostered by the Orders. The obsession of alchemy has always been life: to create it, to mold it, to prolong it indefinitely. Ultimately, it is the practical usurpation of that which is solely the provenance of God.
“This may sound blasphemous to you. It was at that time, anathema. Geber, like many of the savants of his day, led a dual life. In the public sphere, he was the foremost alchemist of the Great Caliph’s court, Harun Ur Rashid, ruler of Baghdad. He invented practically every scientific apparatus for chemistry. He worked with gold, he invented acids, and improved a hundred industrial processes. In today’s legal world, he would have been the richest man on earth from patents alone.
“His real work, however, was with Tawkin. He succeeded at first in prolonging his own life, through application of elixirs. They say that these chemical cures were tortuous and left him hideously disfigured. The savants of the day began to compete with him and then to persecute him as a Satanist. Geber began encoding all of his works so that they said one thing to laymen and something else to his disciples. Near the end of what would have been his natural life, he went into hiding, faking his own death. He had cheated death for some time and escaped his persecutors by the same chance. It bought him some years to perfect his craft: for he was not after a charlatan’s prize, but rather, true immortality itself, pristine in its perfection.
“In the course of time, he met my master, the caliph-imam of the Fatimid world, Al-Hakim. We were the forerunners of the faith now called the Druze. Al-Hakim was the messiah, beloved of an entire people. Yet his enemies were powerful and against him was the entire Sunni Caliphate, as well as members of his own Shi’a world who feared him. Al-Hakim was not merely a religious leader. He was one of the foremost savants of his day, an architect, a linguist, and an expert mathematician.
“Their correspondence and later, their friendship, led to the first accord: the recondite brotherhood of Geber’s was married with the messianic cult of Al-Hakim. Geber shared with Al-Hakim the secrets of Tawkin, the imperfect art. Together they improved it, and I have heard, cured some of Geber’s ailments. My master created the Druze doctrine based on secrecy, to protect Geber, his priceless works, and finally, as the escape hatch he would need to avoid his own enemies.
“He was a brilliant man, my master. Although he was caliph for a time, his power was undermined from within by his sister, who conspired with his enemies to murder him. Geber’s arts saved him but not without the sacrifice of 100 Druze companions. I was one of that number, one of only three survivors of that flight. In those nights of terror and mayhem, I earned the sobriquet Lion, or the Lion of Akkad, and thus I met Geber himself. My master had been poisoned and stabbed. When we arrived at the hidden stronghold of Mount Chouff, in Syria, he was nigh dead from exhaustion and bloodloss. I know not what arts Geber used, but I saw the strain on him, and I knew that he sacrificed much of his own health to save my master’s.
“In the aftermath, neither man recovered fully, although they both lived. Geber, you must realize, was already over 300 years old at this point, kept alive by his arts and the dedication of his acolytes, yet hideously weakened. I sometimes believed he survived by will alone, such was the power of his mind.
“It was thanks to Tawkin that they lived, for my master too had dedicated his life to this pursuit. They created secret underground chambers deep in the mountain, and surrounded by a few loyal men, they started to work. You must understand that their work was neither for God, nor against. It was merely for the glory of man, for their secret creed was that anything conceived in this world by the human mind belonged to man, was his birthright from the Almighty. They believed that the human body was frail and unfit to house the power and beauty of such a thing as the mind.
“They worked some years in secret, these men whom the world thought dead, but always they were beset by enemies who knew better. I was one of their constant companions. Of the 100 Druze, only three of us remained alive, and we three were the favorites of our master, the most trusted cabal and kingdom of the man who had once been caliph of all Fatimid Egypt.
“So you see, in a very small way, I, too was a part of this story. I lived among these giants. Geber offered each of us the gift of longevity, but we saw the hideous price he paid for it, and each of us declined. He was getting desperate. His health was broken, he was already an invalid. He could not leave his cave. It would be his tomb. My master shouldered all of the risk of roaming the world looking for the elements critical to their research.
“Then, I believe, Geber made a fatal error. He had been corresponding with a most brilliant physician and philosopher, a young man by the name of Ibn Sina, known to the world as Avicenna in later years. This man was his protégé in
many ways, although he had no idea who Geber really was. Geber often spoke of him to us. His mastery of the human body was unparalleled. Already he had discovered cures that were hailed as miracles.
“In Geber’s mind, Avicenna was the missing member of our group. Fatally, single-handedly, he invited Avicenna into the secret. Avicenna was a master of the human body, particularly of disease and the immune system. Even then, by himself, he had fathomed much of the nature of bacteria and viruses. He is a truly brilliant man, his intellect sharper than my master’s for it took him only days to ingest the work that my caliph had spent years generating. He was powerful, yes, a fearsome mind. Yet his will was cold. He lacked the empathy of my master, who loved all men. He performed terrible operations on live subjects, caring only for knowledge, ruthless against their suffering. For that reason, my master was wary of him, and advised me to watch him.
“Geber was delighted. He set to work with a demonic will. It was their belief that the human body itself carried the potential to be immortal, that the key merely had to be found to unlock it. Geber had collected many specimen of peculiar nature: trees that lived for thousands of years, animals that could shrug off grievous injuries, insects that regenerated detached limbs. It was all proof that life was remarkable.
“In the end, Geber was right. The three of them succeeded where the two had failed. They needed trusted men to carry out the final tests. My brothers and I were those men. By then, the three had grown slightly distrustful of each other, through the manipulations of Avicenna.