Omar Khayyam - a life (21 page)

"What of Rukn ud Din and his companion
Da'is?
Do they visit it?"

"Never. They are my brain workers; the library and the laboratory are their sphere. They find their own pleasures. You understand by now that my servants are divided into different classes. ,,

"Four you have named."

'The laymen compose the fifth—merchants like Akroenos who attend to matters of trade, in the outer world. Oh, they make a profit out of me, being merchants. But they have never entered the gates of knowledge."

Omar thought of Akroenos, who had come as far as the gate of Alamut once.

"You bear many names, Hassan, son of Sabah."

"Why not? To the laymen and the devoted
Fidais
, I am in truth the lord of life and death. If you doubt that, you will have proof of it presently. They speak of me as the master of the mountain because our strongholds are being built, like Alamut, on the summits of the hills. Such places can be defended by few against many."

"And the
Rafiks
, what of them?"

"The zealots of the new faith, the champions, the apostles.
They
know me as the messenger of the Mahdi—as you did in Jerusalem."

"But now I no longer know you." Omar rose and went to the open window. "What do the two other classes of your converts believe?"

"Two others? I have told you of all five."

"Five, but not all," Omar said over his shoulder. "There are seven."

Amusement crept into Hassan's dark eyes. "For the moment I forgot that you were a mathematician. Enlighten my understanding: why do you say 'seven?"

"Are you not known as Seveners? Your propagandists ask the unenlightened why there are seven days in the week and seven planets in the sky—counting the sun and the moon. I'll wager a dirhem against a Byzantine ducat that you have also seven classes of initiates."

Hassan smiled his appreciation. "Good!" he murmured. "Thou art tempered steel that cuts to the core! Akroenos swears thou wilt rise to great fame, but I say thou art worthy of more than fame. What other secret of Alamut hast thou discovered?"

Only for an instant did Omar hesitate whether to conciliate Hassan or to defy him. Alamut was not the place to show weakness.

"Thy secret of reading letters before they arrive by courier," he said.

"What dog saith that I use trickery? What lie is this?" Hassan's eyes contracted in sudden distrust.

"No dog. A falcon brought this down to me, on the way to Ray." Omar felt in his girdle and drew out the silver tube within which lay the message saying that he was on the road to Ray.

Swiftly Hassan read it, and glanced at the tiny tube. Sheer astonishment drove the rage from his face. "By Allah and by Allah! Ay, naught but a falcon could bring a messenger pigeon from the air. But what luck—what impossible luck is thine." He nodded as if making inward decision. "True, I have used messenger pigeons at times. Here in Alamut they bring the tidings of the world to me. Yet even the Da'is know naught of them. They come to the village, not to the castle—enough! Let us take our hands from the sword-hilt of strife, and tear apart the veil of dissension between us."

Striding to Omar's side, he flung his arm about his shoulders. "Thou art asking thyself—'What is Hassan?' Then hear! Hassan is a wretched soul, once a student of life. What good is it to gain wisdom, where kings and their ministers rule souls as well as bodies? I have been lashed like a wandering dog by the armed guards of Cairo; I have tasted shame and have been flung mockery for consolation, ay, before I was of an age to beget a son. But in Cairo I learned wisdom at the feet of the masters of the Ismailite Lodge—the Seveners as thou wouldst say. I fled over the sea and sat at the feet of the cabbalists, those aged men in Tiberias by the sunken water of Galilee. Enough of that—I love not many words and thou also hast studied the mysteries when the stars grew dim over a weary land."

Hassan lowered his head. "I have tasted the bitter kernel of the fruit of wisdom. There is no God. The religions of the world are like aging women; their beauty and fruitfulness are gone. They are shrinking to the dry bones of superstition; soon nothing will remain of them but the scraps of hair and hide and bone that are preserved like precious stones in the reliquaries and shrines. What is the Black Stone of Mecca but a strange stone that is like iron? If I could cry a message to the listeners of the earth, I would say, 'Overthrow all altars and thrones. They who sit upon the thrones and they who guard the altars are no more than common men shielding themselves behind lies.' It is true that the Moslems who pray to Allah are no wiser than the pagans who made offerings to the sun in the beginning of time. Is it not true?"

"I know," Omar agreed, "that Malikshah is human enough. But if you take him from the throne, what will you put in his place?"

"The first thing would be to do away with the throne and its slavery of bodies. Thou hast more wisdom than four Malikshahs. Why should we submit longer to this king-worship? Men have been working up from ignorance toward reason. In the end men will achieve to perfect reason. . . . Well, I made converts, companions—dissatisfied souls. Secretly we preached the new propaganda."

For several moments Hassan was silent. "Thou hast seen the library, and thou hast talked with the Da'is. Thou knowest we seek to perfect our understanding of all things. But thou knowest also—deny it not—that the mass of Persians have ears and eyes for nothing but the Koran. We needed converts among the masses, for a few intellectuals have never accomplished anything—except to get themselves imprisoned or burned. So to the vulgar we preach the coming of the Mahdi, which is an old superstition in Persia. To the intelligent ones, we preach scientific enlightenment."

Hassan shrugged, as if explaining the inevitable. "Is not life itself ordered in that wise? Does Nizam announce to the mullahs what he confides to you in his study?"

"He takes care," Omar smiled, "not to do so."

"You will find the doctrine made manifest in Plato. It is the very order of the universe. If you have light, you must have shadow. As a mate to man, you have woman. The twain fulfils one destiny. So our
talim
achieves unity by this very divergence —we have faithful converts among all classes."

"Yet you make use of magic."

"Why not? It is the highest wisdom."

"For the common man, perhaps. Your messenger pigeons and trained eagles appear miraculous."

"And for the intelligent ones, the
'arif
, there is a higher magic. Certain arts I learned in Egypt——" Hassan stopped abruptly. "By what art did you prophesy to the prince, who is now Malikshah, the death of his father and the Roman emperor fifteen years ago?"

On the point of answering, an instinct of warning checked Omar. "That miracle," he said calmly, "remains my secret."

"As you will. I have uncovered my secrets to your eyes."

"All but one."

Hassan looked at him intently. "And that is?"

"What the two highest ranks of your order believe—they who are above the Da'is, in Egypt."

"Bismallah!
I did not say they were in Egypt."

"No," Omar admitted, "but I thought they might be."

"You thought!" Hassan turned to pace the length of the room and back. "If that is an idle thought, what will your reasoning be? Khwaja Omar, in Babylon I admired you, and in Jerusalem I desired you for a companion. Since then years have passed, while I have achieved much, and you remain in the same position at court—nay, I think you have forfeited Nizam's patronage. Your road will not be so easy now, with that aged Arranger of the World as petulant as a ruffled hen.

"Consider," he added, "what we of the new order have done for you. I bade Akroenos aid your fortunes, and he has done so faithfully. In the desert by the Euphrates he pulled you back from death; he has filled your palaces with luxuries, while he waited, and I waited for the moment when you should return to me. Admitted, that I watched your actions—as a friend seeking your friendship. Your new calendar, your books, the observatory at Nisapur—I admire every achievement. Do the leaders of Islam show favor to you in this manner? Does even Malikshah understand you as I do? Remember that in a change of mood or a moment's anger the Sultan may dismiss you from the Court. While to me you would be indispensable. Consider that, and come with me to see the strength of Alamut. Nay—" and Hassan smiled—"until now thou hast seen things only through the eyes of my followers. Now look through my eyes."

Omar wanted nothing more than to rest, because his head throbbed strangely and the sunlight that crept through the embrasure danced up and down before his eyes. To match his wits against Hassan's was an ordeal. But Hassan did not seem inclined to give him time for reflection. Instead he led him down into the bowels of the mountain.

Through corridors hewn out of limestone, Omar was taken to caverns where men labored at forges, and others tended furnaces wherein molten glass bubbled.

"They brought this secret from Egypt," Hassan explained. "Why should glass be a rarity only found upon the Sultan's walls? My merchants sell it in the bazaars where only clay jugs and porcelain dishes were sold before."

From the workshops he descended to storerooms filled with wine jars, bins of grain, and casks of honey. Summoning a slave with a torch he entered a space where sacks of rice were stacked to the ceiling.

"Enough," he said, "to feed my people for two years in case of a siege."

In the lowest level of the cellars they came upon wooden kegs beside the black mouth of a hole in the rock.

"Listen," Hassan said.

From the aperture came the splashing of water, falling into a pool.

"When the earth was young," Hassan observed, "this channel of water must have been a small river, at a higher level. It ate its way here and there through the limestone, making most of the tunnels and caverns thou hast seen. Centuries ago, some human beings found their way into the upper caves, and in time they cut the passages and steps over which we have come. Ay, they made a temple here in the heart of the mountain—we found their altar. Come!"

Omar realized that the structure of Alamut on the mountain summit might be no larger than another castle, but in the dephs of the rock it formed a mighty labyrinth. Wayfarers might pass by the outside for generations without suspecting the secret of the bowels of the mountain. Then, too, thousands of men could live here unobserved.

Passing by one of the black sentries, who prostrated himself at his coming, Hassan opened a door at the end of a narrow tunnel and Omar found himself again in the cavern of the stone beast.

It was silent enough now, without the distant music and the stir of the assembled Fidais. But the yellow flame leaped up from the fissure in the rock in front of the natural dais where the dancers had performed, before the claws of the beast. At times the bearded head stood out distinctly against the shadows; then when the flames sank, the cavern was plunged into darkness. Omar noticed what he had not perceived two nights ago, that the air was warm and tainted with the odor of oil.

Even Hassan was silent a moment, contemplating the everlasting fire.

"Who knows its secret?" he murmured. "Down there, somewhere, is oil of the kind the Greeks burned in their lamps. But how did the fire come in the first place and why does it endure without change? Surely it is older than the worship of the god Ra in Egypt; it is older than Zarathustra, and the first sun-worshipers adored it because it seemed magical to them. Ay, they were Magians."

"They did not build the winged bull."

"No, that is the work of the early Persians, who likewise worshiped fire. I have seen figures like it in the ruins of Xerxes' palace down below Isfahan. The Persians simply believed this site to be sacred because it had been a shrine of the earlier worship, and they built their beast to honor or propitiate the sacred fire. Now I hold Islamic ritual here—with certain innovations of my own—to edify my Fidais."

The mood of meditation had left Hassan, and his cynicism returned. His words had the sting of steel.

"And why not?" he laughed. "Did not Muhammad make a holy place of the rock in Jerusalem that the Roman priests had cherished because the Judean king David dreamed there? And what was the rock, before David? Perhaps a well, perhaps an idol of pagans."

Yet in two minutes he looked and acted like another man. Striding from the cavern he turned into a dark passage that Omar had not noticed. A warm wind pushed them forward—and Omar realized why fire could burn and air be breathable in the maw of the mountain—around turn after turn until the darkness overhead became a half-light.

Soon a strip of blue sky was visible far above them, and the sheer rock walls of a chasm took shape on either hand. They had to climb over masses of broken rock until Hassan strode full into the glare of the setting sun at the end of the chasm. Then he stopped, flinging up both arms.

"Oh, my devoted ones! May the blessing of paradise be yours, and the strength of Allah strengthen your arms!"

He was standing above a natural amphitheatre. Behind him on either side the chasm towered the cliff wall that was Ala / ;mut's foundation. The amphitheatre was really a plateau half way down the mountain-side. It swarmed with white garbed figures, running from clay huts and throwing themselves face down before Hassan. Omar recognized the hundreds of Fidais who had watched the sword dance in the cavern. This shelf of the mountain apparently was their barrack, and he thought that there must be some way down from it to the valley below.

"To our lord—the peace!" they cried.

Poised so, his magnificent voice still echoing up the cliff wall, Hassan looked like a prophet able to lead his chosen ones to any promised land. He did not prolong the moment; instead he turned back into the chasm, drawing Omar with him.

Without slackening his pace he went from the lowest level of his stronghold up to the sheer summit. When Omar saw the sun again, they stepped out upon the broad rampart where the wind clutched at them.

The sun was setting, and three young Fidais who seemed to be sentries had laid aside their weapons to pray.