The Golem and the Jinni (58 page)

At the House, he checked with the staff to make certain that the morning’s chaos was still at a manageable level. Satisfied, he closed his office door and opened the satchel.

Instantly his excitement faded. The papers seemed to be notes on some mystical project. He flipped through diagrams, concentric circles and spirals and sunbursts, all scattered about with Hebrew letters. Here and there the esoteric scribbles were interspersed with comments in Yiddish, reporting on his progress. He flipped through the pages, feeling little interest, only fresh sorrow. He’d thought his uncle to be more sensible than to go in for this sort of thing.

Then a sentence caught him, and stopped him cold.

I have named her Chava.

He stared at the words, at the familiar handwriting. He took in the date at the top of the page, not more than a year past. Slowly he turned back to the beginning.

Who am I to destroy her? She’s no less innocent than any other newborn . . .

The incident with the knish: she hears others’ desires and fears, and they overwhelm her. How to counteract? Training, discipline. Must apply to my own mind as well, or risk causing havoc.

How did her creator instill her mental qualities, her personality? A complicated task . . . Just the power of speech alone requires some degree of free will. Perhaps only within certain boundaries, a middle ground between autonomy and enslavement? Yes, true of all of us, but not nearly so precarious a balance, or so dangerous to miscalculate.

Have resisted testing her physical strength, afraid of where it might lead. But today she picked up a corner of the brass bed-frame to sweep beneath it, as easily as I would lift a teakettle.

An experiment today: a walk alone, for five blocks. She performed admirably.

Nights are hardest for her. What would I do, if I didn’t need sleep, and was disinterested in reading? My own sleep has been poor lately—always the fears for her future, for the safety of others. She must know, of course, but we do not speak of it.

Her mental discipline is improving. Another walk on her own, to the store and back, without incident. Observation: of all the desires she must condition herself to ignore, none are sexual in nature. Too consistent to be coincidence, unless she’s simply not telling me, to protect my modesty. Did her creator, knowing he was building a man’s wife, make her resistant to others’ advances? Would ensure fidelity—and of course she’d have to respond to her master, by force of their binding. A terrible, sickening thought. Cannot bring myself to broach the subject aloud.

Living arrangement growing uncomfortable. Must find her an occupation. Seamstress? Laundress? Certainly she needs physical activity. If only women could be bricklayers, stevedores . . .

Will she ever be capable of real love, of happiness? Beginning to hope so, against my own better judgment.

Took her to meet Michael today, at the Sheltering House. She did well, though perhaps a bit stiff, and had difficulty ignoring the men’s thoughts. Still, I believe she is ready for some measure of independence. Michael, clever as always, suggested Radzin’s.

I have named her Chava. Signifying life. A reminder to myself.

Michael put down the paper with a shaking hand. His uncle had gone insane. That was the only explanation. She was a woman, a living woman. She was his
wife
. She was quiet, kind, considerate. An exemplary woman, an excellent cook and housekeeper.

She rarely slept. She always seemed to know what he was thinking.

A torrent of small details began to fill his mind, as though his uncle’s words had broken a secret dam. The coolness of her skin. The way she listened with her entire body, as though hearing something beyond sound. Her uncanny habit of anticipating his every need. The rarity of her laugh. The distance in her eyes.

No
. He struggled against the flood, ordering himself to be sensible. His uncle was suggesting—what? That she was a creature of some kind? That his nightmare was real?

There were only a few sheets of paper left. He didn’t want to read any more—he was beginning to feel sick—but his hand, mutinous, turned the pages. His uncle had begun to simply scribble furiously, like a student cramming for an exam. Ideas were circled, crossed out, rewritten.
Check against fragment from Alphabet of Akiba ben Joseph, then compare with theory of Abba ben Joseph bar Hama. Incompatible? Is there precedence?
As he turned the pages, the handwriting grew more slapdash, the words scattered across the page in haste or fatigue.

On the last page, only two lines were written. One was a long, unbroken stream of letters. And above it, underlined, his uncle’s hand shaking with effort:

To Bind a Golem to a New Master

Night was falling in the desert. It woke the serpents and the voles and brought them out from their hiding places, giving fresh meat to the falcons. It flattened the hills and stones, so that from its mouth, ibn Malik’s cave seemed an endless abscess in the earth. As the far horizon dimmed, Abu Yusuf built a fire just outside the cave, wrapped himself in sheep hides against the coming cold, and tried not to imagine what might be happening in the darkness behind him.

Ibn Malik, it seemed, had not been exaggerating when he said he’d been waiting for this all his life. “Most jinn are inferior things,” he’d told Abu Yusuf as they went deeper and deeper into the warren of caves, pausing only to light the greasy torches set into the passage walls. “
Ifrits
,
ghuls
, even the minor and middling jinn themselves—I could capture a hundred of them if I wished, but why take the trouble? Dull and stupid, easily distracted, what use is such a servant? But a powerful jinni—oh, that is something very different.”

Abu Yusuf was only half listening, concentrating instead on carrying the still-unconscious Fadwa through the narrow, twisting corridor. Some of the passages were barely wide enough for a man, and Abu Yusuf, who’d lived his whole life under the open sky, felt a creeping horror, an urge to turn and run.

“I assume you’re familiar with the stories of King Sulayman,” said ibn Malik, and Abu Yusuf chose not to dignify this with a reply: only a wild orphan might be ignorant of the tales. “They have all been embellished, of course, but at their heart they’re mainly true. The magic granted to Sulayman allowed him to control even the strongest of the jinn, and use them to his kingdom’s benefit. When Sulayman died, the magic disappeared with him. Or, rather, most of it disappeared.” Ibn Malik glanced back at Abu Yusuf. “I have spent the last thirty years combing the desert for the remnants of that magic. And now, you have brought me the key.”

Abu Yusuf looked down at the silent girl in his arms.

“Not your daughter—what’s
inside
her. The spark that the jinni left behind. If we harness it properly, we can use it to find him, and control him.”

“And that’s why you say she can’t be healed yet.”

“Of course,” ibn Malik said, the words floating over his shoulder. “If we lose the spark, we lose the key.”

Abu Yusuf stopped walking. After a moment ibn Malik realized he was no longer being followed, and turned around. With his torch held above his head, he looked like a glowing skeleton, an image that his calm smile did little to alter. “I understand,” he said. “Why should you help ibn Malik, that insane old wizard? What do you care whether he finds this jinni or not? You have no taste for revenge, and rightly so—revenge for its own sake is worse than useless. You want nothing more than to heal your daughter, pay the price, and ride back to your tent, to your own bed and your sleeping wife.” The torchlight shone in his eyes, like a jinni-spark of his own. “Did you know that next summer will bring the worst drought the Bedu have seen in generations? It will last years, and turn every grazing field between here and the Ghouta to dust. This is no divination, no prophecy. The signs are there for anyone to read, in the movements of the moon and sun, the patterns of snakes, the formations of birds. All point to disaster. Unless, of course, you are prepared.”

Abu Yusuf tightened his grip on his daughter. The words might be a lie, to coerce him or throw him off his guard—but his stomach told him they were the truth. Perhaps he was not as skilled at reading the signs as ibn Malik, but he realized now that he had known, in a way beyond knowing. Maybe that was why he had kept Fadwa at home instead of sending her away to a new husband, a new clan, where she would be a stranger in their eyes, the newest mouth to feed. Where she might give birth only to watch her child wither and die.

Keeping his voice steady, he said, “And what has this to do with the jinni?”

“Use your imagination, Abu Yusuf. Think of what a bound jinni could do for your clan. Why risk life and limb scouting for water, when he could do it for you? Why huddle against the wind in a ragged tent, when you might sleep in a jinni-built palace?”

“Oh, so you plan to bind this jinni to
my
will? Or do you think he will consent to two masters?”

Ibn Malik smiled. “You’re right, of course. It would act under my own command, not yours. And now you will wonder why I would trouble myself to protect your family, what incentive I might have. I might tell you, and truthfully, that I care more for the well-being of my fellow Hadid than you think—”

Abu Yusuf snorted.

“—But I sense you would be a hard man to convince, so think on this instead. By all accounts, the jinn under Sulayman’s rule loved their master and accepted his yoke joyfully. At least, by all
human
accounts. The jinn tell their own tales, and in them Sulayman is an enslaver, cunning and cruel. It is not clear which of these is the truth. Perhaps they honestly loved Sulayman, or perhaps he bent their minds as well as their wills, and took their love through force. But this I can tell you: the jinni we seek will not love me. He will loathe me with every measure of his being. He will try to escape my service at every opportunity, through magic or trickery. And yet, whatever I command, he must in fact do.”

“You wish to keep him occupied,” Abu Yusuf said.

“Exactly. A jinni who must carry your sheep back and forth to the Ghouta will have little time for plotting.”

Abu Yusuf considered. If he consented to this, then he would be complicit in enslaving another being. A jinni, yes, but a slave nonetheless. And if not . . .

Ibn Malik was watching him carefully. “Would you value a jinni’s freedom over your family’s lives?” he said quietly. “The jinni that destroyed your daughter’s mind, no less?”

“You said that revenge is worse than useless.”

“Revenge for its own sake, yes. But if it can be gained along the way . . .” Again the jackal’s grin.

Abu Yusuf wondered, did he truly have a choice? Already Fadwa’s life was in the wizard’s hands. If he refused, and went back home with his raving daughter, what would he say to Fatim? Would he subject everyone he loved to ruin, just to preserve his own sense of honor? He asked, “Why take the time to convince me? If I disagree you could simply kill me, take Fadwa, and do whatever you like.”

Ibn Malik raised an eyebrow. “True. But I prefer reason and agreement. Allies are much more useful than bodies.”

The last of the linked caverns in the hillside was also one of the largest. Its corners were littered with scavenged items of every kind: singed hides and sheep bones, heaps of old metal ornaments, pitted sword-blades, clay jars and dried herbs. In a large cavity at the center of the cavern, ibn Malik had built a fire pit surrounded by a high ring of rough stones. Nearby stood an enormous, tablelike boulder. Presumably the wizard had maneuvered it into the cavern, though Abu Yusuf had no idea how. It was scarred and cracked in places, and covered with dark sooty streaks. Was it an anvil?

He watched ibn Malik as he scuttled here and there, fetching pots and powders and pieces of metal. From some recess he drew out a leather roll, and unwound it to reveal a collection of metal tools: hide-wrapped tongs, curved black hooks, blunt hammers, needle-thin awls. Abu Yusuf paled to see them, and ibn Malik chuckled. “They’re for metalwork, not your daughter,” the wizard said. With them, he explained, he would forge the instruments they would use to capture the jinni: a flask to contain him, and a cuff to bind and keep him in human form. “For the flask, copper, I think,” said ibn Malik, sorting through his stores. “And iron for the cuff.”

“But the jinn can’t abide the touch of iron.”

“All the better to control him.”

The forging, ibn Malik said, would take a day, possibly more. “Take your daughter, and wait outside the caves,” he said. “When night falls, build a fire, and don’t travel outside its light until sunrise. There are things in the desert I’ve angered over the years. It would be a shame if they attacked you by mistake.”

Abu Yusuf unloaded his supplies from his horse’s panniers and set up camp at the mouth of the cave. He created a makeshift pallet for Fadwa and covered her with hides and blankets, hoping their weight would keep her still. The sedative ibn Malik had given her seemed to be wearing off—she stirred occasionally, and muttered to herself. He gathered enough brush and kindling to last until dawn, built a considerable blaze, and settled in, wondering if he should believe ibn Malik’s warning about the fire. More likely the wizard wanted to keep him from sneaking away before dawn. But as the sky deepened to blues and purples and the first stars emerged, Abu Yusuf listened to the wind curling along the cliffs and the soft scufflings of unseen creatures, and set more kindling on the flames.