Assassins - Ian Watson & Andy West (11 page)

Ah, Hakim told himself, I can think fully
again, without constant interruption by that incessant, nagging
ache. He spat once more. Arwe shuffled closer, still on his knees,
and sniffed at him. Satisfied, the Priest-Witch hummed tunelessly,
nodding to himself. Guba provided leaves for wiping oneself and
spitting into if necessary.

A few hours later, flickering flames roasted the
joints and ribs of a skinny cow. Tumultuous villagers danced and
sang until sweat sheened their bodies. The moon was full and
bright. By its silver light, older women were scraping the hide of
the slaughtered animal, rendering offal that couldn’t be eaten into
tallow, boiling out some dye from the gall bladder, slicing meat
for drying. Hakim’s gum and accompanying hole still leaked blood
occasionally, but his remaining discomfort was much less than that
persistent jinnee of a toothache.

Arwe sat in his black throne, on supports to
raise him up. Goggle-eyed Guba stood proudly by Arwe’s side like a
vizier, or a hybrid of medical orderly and pagan acolyte, since he
held a knife and an inverted monkey skull doing duty as bowl.
Hakim, Sadiq, and Yaqob sat cross-legged to Arwe’s left as the old
man swayed and chanted, eyes rolled upward.

At a shout from nearby, dancing and singing
abruptly ceased. The villagers, perhaps two hundred in all,
gathered around the Priest-Witch and his guests, craning to get the
best view.

Then two young men, bodies and faces daubed
ghostlike with white pigment, came rushing through, bearing the
struggling figure of a small child… no, it was leaner and
longer-limbed, not quite human.
A demon
, declared Hakim’s
shocked thought. No, it was a monkey, its fur made hoary by the
moonlight. A muzzle was tied over its mouth.

The ghost-men knelt before the black throne,
holding out the panicking monkey by its stretched arms. The animal
jerked impotently and its feet scrabbled for purchase. Arwe made
gestures and soothing noises, which seemed to calm the animal
somewhat. Still it darted fearful glances at the circle of
spectators, at the nearby tongue-tips of flame and bat-wings of
smoke.

Guba passed the knife to his master and
crouched forward, carefully positioning the bone bowl. Arwe bent
and slipped the blade under the monkey’s neck, raising its chin so
that their sight met. His human eyes engaged the animal’s gleaming
eyes that did not know what a knife was or what it could do.

Arwe intoned what might be a prayer.

“What does he say?” whispered Sadiq to
Yaqob.

“I don’t understand,” was the reply.

Suddenly Arwe slashed, and Guba was catching
blood that poured from the monkey’s severed throat as it
convulsed.

Ululating, the ghost-men bore the dying
animal away to hurl its body onto the bonfire to complete its
death. Guba thrust the bowl at Hakim. He took this gift without
hesitation and raised it to his lips. It couldn’t be so bad; after
all, the taste of blood was already in his mouth! Having swallowed
half of the warm contents, he offered the bowl to Arwe, but the
Priest-Witch gestured Hakim to drain it dry. At which the crowd
leapt up and down, yelling encouragement. He finished drinking and
wiped his lips.

“Translate this carefully, Yaqob. You honour
me, great Priest. Am I now a blood-brother of those who worship
monkeys?”

The exact reply eluded the translator. “He
says something about
monkey
and
spirit
within
you
and
protect.
But many of the words aren’t Oromiffa,
or maybe I never heard them before.”

“Ask him to repeat what he said more
simply.”

Elusive as ever, Arwe called instead for
meat, which came quickly, chopped up and served on banana leaves as
plates. First the old man sucked the juices from chunks in his
toothless mouth, then with a slobbery kiss he transferred these to
a serviceable young woman with prominent breasts, for her to
masticate more before returning them to Arwe lip-to-lip to
swallow.

Southern
Ethiopia: September 1157

All of Hakim’s expertise, and Arwe’s redoubtable
will-power and witchcraft, were unable to delay the inevitable. The
old man was simply far too old, his organs worn out, although the
Priest-Witch’s mind was still mischievous enough to keep Hakim in
suspense until almost the last moment. He, Hakim, God’s chosen
vessel for the secrets of blood and plague, was reduced to begging
for more clues, was nearly reduced to despair.

Until just before the last, death-bed
moment.

Then, finally,
praise be to God the
Merciful who had heeded his prayer
, the pagan gasped out
long-guarded knowledge. Yaqob’s whispered translation was, “Good
monkey-spirit… can protect… from plague. Rare monkey-spirit…”

“
How do I know which is a good
monkey?
” Hakim implored, on his knees by the old man’s
head.

“Look… for monkey…
old
before its
time.” So saying, Arwe cackled, the sound diminishing into his
death-rattle.

A monkey old before its time?
Arwe had
left him a teasing legacy.

Guba kept a night-long vigil beside his
former master’s corpse, banging loudly on a gourd-drum to begin
with, then less noisily until finally towards dawn he was merely
tapping intermittently, as if echoing the departure of Arwe’s
spirit into a far distance which finally became immeasurable.

After sunrise, wearing a monkey skin draped
over his head and down his back, grizzled by the dust of mourning
thrown over it by young women, Guba led an ululating procession to
the river. Laid upon a reed mat and partly covered by Guba’s
monkey-cape, the corpse was launched out upon sluggish water, to be
torn apart soon enough by contending crocodiles. Thus no trace nor
trophy of Arwe would remain, which might be misused or abused.

And so began goggle-eyed Guba’s reign. Hakim
persuaded the younger successor to

sample, much diluted with water, the violet
liquid derived from seaweed. This medicine soon calmed Guba’s
restlessness, his rapid heartbeat, his tremors of the fingers and
sweating, both relieving these afflictions and lending Guba greater
dignity. An alliance with Hakim resulted, which saw the village
embark upon new practises regarding captive monkeys, the better to
honour the monkey-spirits, of course.

Many more monkeys should be captured, Hakim
cunningly advised. For the more monkeys, the greater the spirit of
the village! Was this not so?

Indeed it was. Inhabitants of other villages
sharing the same language and beliefs began to visit, led by their
own lesser priest-witches, paying homage and bringing lavish gifts
of food. The growing size and complexity of the monkey shrine was
making Guba’s village a little Mecca for the pagans. And it seemed
too that Arwe’s redoubtable reputation now attached itself to Guba,
yet without the dread which the old man had also inspired.

Monkeys with weeping eyes, monkeys that
sneezed and coughed, were segregated to breed, for Hakim sought to
concentrate those evil spirits that Arwe had said seeded plague, or
rather, as Hakim thought to himself, concentrate the bad humours in
such monkeys. Surely their offspring would also sneeze and cough
and have watery eyes, thus providing him with a pure and
predictable supply of animals to experiment with.

Yet, except for one isolated instance, this
was not so.

“Why not, why not?” Hakim demanded of Sadiq
in vain.

“You’re beyond me in most of your thinking,”
confessed Sadiq.

In one matter, Guba followed Arwe’s canny
precedent. The catching of monkeys was a strictly religious matter,
so Hakim should not witness nor learn the actual method. Yet in all
other regards, there was the fullest co-operation.

As soon as Hakim gained Guba’s complete
confidence, naturally he asked about ‘monkeys old before their
time’, only to discover to his chagrin that the skin sported by
Guba for Arwe’s funeral had come from just such a monkey, hairs
grizzled while not even fully grown. Due to how dusty the fur had
been on account of the funeral rites, Hakim had seen, yet did not
see at all! As Arwe had no doubt envisioned, when he cackled his
last. That precious skin, which Hakim could have studied, was
squandered as food for crocodiles.

And then a realisation stunned him. The young
monkey whose blood Arwe gave him to drink during the pagan
ceremony… in the moonlight
its
fur had been hoary! Silver
though the moonlight was, moonlight alone was not enough to
transform the usual brown coat of these creatures!

Had Arwe somehow conferred on him protection
against plague? Or at least given what Arwe
believed
to be
protection. Was that what his mysterious words after the ceremony
meant? Why was that done with blood? Realisation became a thrill, a
cautious belief, or at least almost a belief. Had the pagan Arwe
truly been God’s tool? Was he, Hakim, now properly armed for God’s
ultimate work?

Sadiq was certainly not protected, however,
nor Yaqob. Hakim decided it would serve no useful purpose to alert
his colleagues to this. He would have to be cautious about his
speculations, yet he couldn’t resist some discussion, some
revelation about the ideas that were bursting up inside him, as
though al-Khidr the Intercessor himself was calling forth a
fountain of knowledge in his head.

“So,” said Hakim to Sadiq, “according to our
departed Priest-Witch, a youngish monkey with grey fur may give
protection against plague. Because, I deem, that monkey itself
is already protected
.”

“Obviously not by a jinnee!”

“Quite so. Protected by a substance which
must surely be in the monkey’s blood. For blood is the plentiful
river of the body, which circles around and around, pumped by the
heart.”

“
Pumped?
”

“Galen’s views are plainly wrong. The blood
certainly lies still
after
death, but not before. How else
can blood gush from a wound, unless it is being pumped? Air does
not displace this blood.”

“You should write a treatise about this!”

“I must leave that to some other physician.
God has appointed me to study plague and to make of plague His
scimitar.”

“There does exist another river. Or rather
stream. I refer to urine.”

“Oh Sadiq, if a substance protects, would it
regularly be pissed out?”

“But how can that which protects make the
monkey die young?”

“The monkey
looks
old before its time.
The cure must carry some cost, some chronic ailment perhaps. Yet
not necessarily a
fatal
cost.”

To Hakim’s great frustration, younger monkeys
with greying hair were not yet among those captured.

Southern Ethiopia:
March 1158

The tribe an hour to the west had become jealous of
Guba’s prospering community. Raids on cattle began. When warriors
from Guba’s village retaliated, lives were lost on both sides,
provoking further bloodshed.

“The Igwe are scum,” Guba informed Hakim.
“They worship hyenas and eat their shit. Their women don’t know who
sires their babies. They hate everyone.”

Hakim wondered whether this assessment was
quite accurate, and what the Igwe opinion might be of Guba’s
people.

“Instead of killing Igwe warriors,” Hakim
suggested, “maybe they can be captured and brought back here
alive.”

“For torture?” asked Guba.

“Not exactly… but yes, to die horrible
deaths. The monkey-spirits we venerate should be allowed to exact
their vengeance upon the vile Igwe, and this I believe they will
do, in the most terrible manner.”

Guba eagerly agreed.

At last, thought Hakim, he would be able to
experiment upon men; he could have them drink the blood of weeping
monkeys. And may God be merciful to them, although they were
pagans, for their awful suffering would be to His glory! Hakim had
thought the theory through and through. He was confident now that
the blood of weeping monkeys would seed plague, whereas the blood
of prematurely aged monkeys conferred protection from the very same
affliction.

And so it was that three Igwe youths were
soon held captive in a newly built cage of strong bamboo, adjoining
the monkey cages. They were daily objects of mockery for Guba’s
people, although not targets for physical abuse. Hakim bled a
weeping monkey, and by threat of burnings, conveyed
enthusiastically by a villager who spoke Igwe, he compelled the
three youths to drink cups of blood, with the direst consequence
for any one of them who spilled so much as a single drop. Then
Hakim waited patiently, inspecting the prisoners three times a day
in case the guard failed to notice the earliest signs. Yet a whole
month and more went by, without any of the youths developing tokens
of plague. Too long!

Hakim doubted both himself and Arwe’s
knowledge, so tenuously passed on. He sought inspiration in prayer,
and questioned himself. What if the seed of plague wasn’t in the
blood, after all? Loath as he was to sacrifice a captive monkey, he
ordered one animal to be killed, then with Sadiq’s assistance
dissected it. Again by threat of torments, he compelled one of the
Igwe to eat its raw brains, a second the heart, a third the liver.
He watched those youths for several hours afterwards, in case they
vomited, involuntarily or deliberately.

And he waited again, day after day, week
after week, to no avail.

With blades of dry grass, Hakim swabbed the
tears from a weeping monkey that was restrained by villagers, then
compelled the prisoners to lick the swabs. Still no success.

Increasingly, Guba had been grumbling at the
failure of the Igwe prisoners to succumb to the promised fatal
torments. It wasn’t that Guba didn’t respect Hakim’s peculiar
approach to bodily matters, not after the success of the violet
liquid. However, Guba had his own status to sustain. So finally
stern justice must be meted out to the Igwe trio, the sterner in
view of all the delay.