Assassins - Ian Watson & Andy West (8 page)

So eventually Yaqob had brought Hakim and
Sadiq and their three slave porters to a distant village of tall
straw huts surrounded by banana groves, close to a sluggish river
where crocodiles basked. At first sight a rather backward village,
although extensive and visibly armed with spears and bows.

And at first sight the famed Priest-Witch
seemed decrepit, as one might reasonably expect if he was truly so
ancient. Bald but for a few white hairs, Arwe’s face was rutted
with wrinkles. His limbs looked like knotty sinew dried in the sun
and wrapped around bones, as though, with potions and conjurations
and purifying encounters with spirits that only he could see, he
had slowly mummified himself alive. His only finery was a belt of
bright beads over a whitish sleeveless robe, which appeared on him
more like the shroud for a victim of starvation. Yet his dark,
piercing eyes!

Hakim presented a fine brass tray as a gift,
uncertain whether the value was too high. Or maybe too low?

Hospitality proved to be the boiled meat of
some forest creature, steeped in a sauce made from fiery hot
peppers and pungent onions. This stew was poured onto the brass
tray itself to be shared, each man scooping with torn pieces of a
red and spicy pancake-shaped sourbread. Was the tray used out of
politeness, or as a rebuke? Was the burning of one’s mouth by the
sauce a culinary treat or a trial by ordeal? Or maybe a way of
making the meat safer to eat? Hakim perspired; he certainly felt it
as a trial!

There followed interminable chewing of bitter
green leaves, apparently to enliven the mind.

Arwe listened intently rather than
responding, head cocked, as beady-eyed as a parrot who seemed
intent on memorising the words of these strangers from afar. Hakim
spoke with a customary passion he suspected Yaqob couldn’t or
didn’t convey in translation, though both speakers were hampered by
the cud in their mouths.

From time to time, Arwe asked questions of
Sadiq, as though addressing these directly to Hakim might allow
Hakim’s responses to cast some influence over him, perhaps letting
his principal visitor achieve too much presence. Was this a form of
respect, or was it insulting?

Sadiq described himself as a colleague and
close friend of Hakim, though his tone suggested that
disciple
was closer to the truth. Only by exposing his
apocalyptic vision to Sadiq, by adding fuel to existing religious
fervour, had Hakim acquired a necessary and dedicated companion for
this scientific venture.

As the afternoon wore on, Arwe’s questioning
of Sadiq about what Arab doctors did to heal their sick
intensified; and sometimes the ancient man grinned toothlessly in a
superior way. With a great effort of will, Hakim remained composed,
yet it seemed hours before Arwe deigned to react directly, fully
acknowledging him.

Translated by Yaqob, Arwe said enigmatically,
“Spirits from the other world live in monkeys. Let us go to the
house of the monkeys and listen to their cries.”

Hakim was taken aback, mentally groping for a
connection. Would he need to repeat what he had already said all
over again,
to monkeys
?

Arwe uttered an order. Within a minute,
strong young men brought a carved throne of black wood to his door,
portable on thick bamboo poles, to which Arwe hobbled. Although he
moved awkwardly, his gait seemed more spry than enfeebled.

They wended past a dozen huts until they came
to a great bamboo cage where monkeys at once commenced an outcry,
then fell strangely silent. The animals had thick brownish fur,
though on some it was as if ochre or crushed nettles were rubbed
in. Strangely man-like hands and feet were black-skinned, the faces
too, these adorned by white brows and wispy white beards. The males
sported blue scrotal sacs and red penises. Access for food, without
risk of the confined monkeys escaping, was a bamboo door opening
into a much smaller inner cage, itself equipped with a door. A big
clay bowl held water. Hakim couldn’t see much excrement, so dung
must be raked out regularly. A villager armed with a spear stood
guard.

Arwe addressed the monkeys in his local
language, which Yaqob couldn’t translate.

Next, the old man seemed to go into a trance,
his eyelids fluttering.

Several monkeys rushed to the bars, baring
teeth, then crying out raucously. One chattering male masturbated,
jerking semen from itself.

Presently Arwe returned to himself and spoke,
evidently in Oromiffa, for Yaqob translated: “Our Gods permit you
to stay.”

Southern Ethiopia:
May 1157

One morning the Priest-Witch and his visitors were
talking over coffee. The brass pot and glass cups they used were
another gift from Hakim to the old man. Two further pots of local
manufacture had also been filled. Hakim was glad Arwe had chosen
coffee to enliven their minds and not the bitter green leaves, for
one of his molars had developed a nagging twinge that was made
worse by prolonged chewing.

Sitting cross-legged with them and twitching
his feet, was Guba, a man perhaps in his forties, Arwe’s assistant
and already appointed as his future successor. Guba’s eyes bulged
as though magnified by curved glass. Obviously a defect in the
glands at the base of his neck was responsible, and a good cure was
to eat seaweeds, unavailable here. Hakim had in his baggage a
bottle of the stinging violet liquid produced from seaweed, which
he used to stop wounds from festering. Diluted down, this would
control Guba’s condition, but Arwe had brusquely rejected Hakim’s
offer of treatment. Those protruding orbs of eyes made Guba appear…
visionary, a quality which evidently Arwe wished for in his
successor. Restless activity was also associated with the
complaint. Maybe before Arwe died, the Priest-Witch would confide
to his heir which plants from what soils could lessen the symptoms.
Or perhaps Guba already knew, yet preferred to appear urgently
perceptive.

By now Hakim had seen Arwe banish malarial
fever from a woman, by using a potion and incantations. She soon
stopped shaking and sweating and claimed that her pounding headache
had vanished. With a poultice and more of his spells, he cured a
wounded foot that had looked gangrenous. While Hakim thought the
rituals of magic might provide a mental benefit for patients who
were certain of the shaman’s spiritual powers, he nevertheless
fully acknowledged the impressive range and depth of Arwe’s
understanding of the body and of natural remedies.

In a cautious exchange of knowledge with
Hakim, Arwe had begun to confide some explanations of his
spirit-inspired choices. All the while, Hakim had to bear in mind
the Priest-Witch’s certainty that spirits resided in animals, in
plants, even in rocks, a belief very different from the Qu’ran’s
declarations that
jinn
were created from smokeless fire and
inhabited an immaterial world. As often as Hakim deemed diplomatic,
he would mention plague and its signs and its possible sources.

The coffee was less than half drunk when a
runner came to Arwe’s door and jabbered.

Having heard the man’s gasped words, Arwe
went into a semi-trance while he took the messenger’s head in his
hands, and licked delicately at his face like a snake, and sniffed
him, and chanted for a long while, his eyes rolling up whitely.
Then he issued orders.

The black throne on its bamboo poles was
brought.

“What interests you,” Yaqob translated, “has
come to… it’s the name of a village half a day’s travel from here,
I think. You’ll see what you most wish,
if
you dare.”

“Surely the old man means plague!” exclaimed
Sadiq. “Allah is great to let us witness this so soon. It might
have taken years. And surely He will protect you and me, otherwise
He would not offer this example so willingly, that we may probe and
seek understanding.”

Hakim nodded, yet thought to himself:
If
it is His will, Allah shall indeed safeguard me because of my
mission. But you too, good Sadiq? Not inevitably.

A big woven basket containing bread hung from the
back of Arwe’s throne as his four porters bore him from the
village, accompanied by Hakim, Sadiq and Yaqob. Spears and bows lay
alongside the throne on either side, in case the porters suddenly
needed to set down their burden and become warriors. A couple of
other armed villagers paced alongside, also one of the Arabs’
slaves, burdened with gourds of water stoppered with leaves. Men
clutching bows were now guarding the approach to the village with
much more vigilance than Hakim had previously seen. There’d been a
lull for many months in sporadic hostilities with a community an
hour away to the west; evidently the runner’s news from the south
had caused Arwe to alert the sentries.

The Priest-Witch chuckled dryly, for he had
noticed Hakim noticing.

By way of Yaqob: “From today if a stranger
approaches, even if he appears full of health, the guards will
shout once,
Go away!
If the stranger ignores this, then they
will kill him with arrows and leave his body where it lies for a
moon and a week.”

Hakim’s heart leapt within his chest. At
last! Arwe was displaying rare knowledge on the subject of plague.
The Priest-Witch understood the period between plague putting its
seed into a person, and the harvest of that seed suddenly flaring
up! Typically, Arwe had refrained from saying this directly but
only dropped a hint, no doubt to see whether Hakim would beg for
clarification. At times the old man could be so miserly with
information! Well, hard-won wisdom was after all Arwe’s source of
power. Yet occasionally he would offer a surprise nugget of
knowledge, as if perhaps he wished to spin out his visitors’ stay
for his own stimulation.
What more did the Priest-Witch know
about plague?
Possibly much more than Hakim had gleaned from
the libraries of the civilised world!

“Guba isn’t with us,” commented Sadiq. “We
say that it’s foolish to carry both eggs in the same hand.” Which
Yaqob translated.

“I shall never die from plague,” declared
Arwe, “even though my death is surely due.”

Considering Arwe’s greatly advanced years, in
fact overdue, Hakim reluctantly admitted.
Allah, preserve this
useful pagan a while longer!

“Nor will my successor ever die from
plague!”

How could he be so sure?
But Hakim
believed the Priest-Witch, ecstatically sensing great knowledge and
power nearly within his own grasp.

Hakim beheld the aftermath of a hell-on-Earth. The
survivors, if any there were, must have fled into the forest.

Red-mouthed hyenas were feeding on scores of
corpses sprawled higgledy-piggledy among deserted huts; corpses
that even from a distance looked ugly and suppurating, and seemed
to have been tossed hither and thither as though by demons who had
also foully tormented them. Beside this scene even the massacres of
war might seem clean, almost merciful yet also, Hakim knew, far
less effective. Carrion birds hopped about, vile scraps hanging
from their beaks.

Jabbering, Arwe’s bearers’ set him down,
their limbs trembling not from the extended exertion of the
journey, but in abject fright.

The Arabs’ slave moaned in terror, and Yaqob
shuddered. “I not go more,” he said, grammar driven from his
mind.

Arwe seemed unconcerned. Toting a bag, he
rose from his black seat and directed an abrupt order at Hakim.

“Yaqob!” snapped Hakim. “Translate!”

“He said,
support me
.”

Arwe had darted glances at Hakim and at the
others, yet he was cocking his head towards the yapping of hyenas
rather than staring directly at the terrible spectacle. It occurred
to Hakim then that the old man’s piercing eyes must actually be
quite short-sighted. If so, the horrors that Hakim saw clearly must
still be quite blurred for the Priest-Witch. Maybe the spirit-world
was easier to see, or to imagine, in a luminous blur!

Aware of the precaution he should take, Hakim
tied a fabric mask in place over his mouth and nose, then duly
clutched the wizened Priest-Witch under one armpit, easily taking
his pathetic weight as Arwe set one bare foot before the other.
More brusque words in Oromiffa. Yaqob’s tremulous voice. “Come to
feast your eyes!
Come!
”

And to feast Arwe’s eyes too, once he was
close enough to focus.

Hakim realised that he wasn’t propelling the
Priest-Witch so much as being dragged forward against his will.
With a prayer, Hakim advanced, breathing deeply to calm himself and
quell his fears. Such would be the scene if his quest succeeded, he
reminded himself, yet vastly multiplied in many lands. God’s
enemies would be felled by God’s own instrument.

Let it be!

“Stay where you are, Sadiq,” Hakim called out
behind him, serene now as they drew closer, becoming coolly
observant...

His professional eye picked out angry red
spots and black sores, festering boils and slimy pustules,
swellings, limbs twisted askew, liquefied guts and unidentifiable
deliquescing organs seeping through hyena-torn bellies. The
festering vomit wasn’t merely dark with flies, but blackened. The
smell was fouler than the contents of any diseased and shit-filled
bowel, yet laced too with a nauseating sweetness.

Arwe hissed like a cat at hyenas that bared
their yellow teeth, and he gestured splay-fingered, hypnotically,
until the animals whined and reluctantly withdrew to worry at more
distant corpses. Some way off, Hakim spied a pile of charred
branches, the remains of what must have been a big bonfire.
Probably evidence of fearful villagers burning the earliest kin to
fall victim, before the situation became uncontrollable.

Evidently unafraid, Arwe hobbled among the
dead bodies, pointing at ghastly signs they’d discussed before and
uttering single words, some of which Hakim knew by now. Then the
Priest-Witch stopped by the ruined corpse of a young man, jerking a
knobbed finger demandingly at the sharp knife Hakim always wore.
Hakim handed over the blade, after which Arwe mimed being helped to
kneel. Hakim complied, then was gestured back a pace or two. Oh
yes, in case pressure of gas in the body caused foul liquids to
spray.