The Golem and the Jinni (66 page)

The horse. He had to get to Abu Yusuf’s horse.

He staggered to the palace gate and struggled to lift the bar away, ignoring the feel of his insides shifting. At last the gate was open. He found the stallion and untied it, leaving the pony behind. He hauled himself onto the horse’s back, smearing its side with his blood. He tried to kick it into a gallop; the horse, feeling only a gentle nudge, began a slow and jarring trot.
Go, you stinking bag of bones
, thought ibn Malik, but it was all he could do to lace his fingers into the mane and hang weakly on.

He’d made it halfway across the valley when the jackals descended.

Frenzied by the smell of blood, they ignored the horse’s kicks and pulled ibn Malik screaming from its side. With the last dregs of his energy he fought a few of them off; the rest, sensing his exhaustion, vaulted the charred bodies of their pack mates and tore out his throat.

For all the wizard’s strength and power, the jackals found he made rather a small meal.

The desert is a vast and empty place, and travelers are few and far between.

The gnawed bones of Wahab ibn Malik bleached and cracked in the sun. His cloak dissolved into scattered shreds. The copper flask lay tipped on its side. It gathered a light covering of dust, but it did not tarnish. Animals sniffed at it, then left it alone.

In faraway cities, caliphs rose and were overthrown. Waves of invading armies fell upon the deserts, made their brief mark, and were conquered in their turn.

One day, long after the last traces of ibn Malik had vanished from the desert, a caravan outrider stopped by a sheltering rock to relieve himself. The caravan was twenty days out from Ramadi, and bound for ash-Sham. The outrider was tasked with ensuring there would be no surprises along the way, no raiders or mercenaries demanding payment for safe passage. He took a drink from his waterskin and was about to mount his horse again when a glint of metal caught his eye.

In a small depression in the ground lay a copper flask, half-buried in dust and scrub.

He picked up the flask and brushed the dirt away. It was well made and handsome, with an interesting pattern of scrollwork around its base. Perhaps it had been lost from an earlier caravan. He thought it was the sort of thing his mother might like. He placed the flask in his saddlebag, and rode on.

Over the years the flask passed from hand to hand, from son to mother to niece to daughter to daughter-in-law. It was used to hold oil, or frankincense, or simply for decoration. It accumulated a few small dents but was never seriously damaged, even when it should have been. Once in a while its owner would notice that it always seemed warm to the touch; but then the thought would pass, as such idle thoughts always do. Down the generations the flask went until at last it was placed in the luggage of a young woman bound from Beirut to New York—a gift from her mother, to remember her by.

And as for ibn Malik?

You are bound to me, fire to flesh, soul to soul, and sealed in blood for as long as you shall live.

The wizard had been canny and devious in life, but in death he’d outsmarted even himself. Soul to soul they were bound, as long as the Jinni should live: and there the Jinni sat, trapped in his flask, living out a millennium in one eternal moment.

Which meant that death was not the end for Wahab ibn Malik al-Hadid.

The morning after the jackals devoured the wizard’s carcass down to the bones, a child was born in a faraway eastern land, in a city called Chang’an. His parents named him Gao. From the beginning Gao was a clever boy. As he grew, he soon outpaced his tutors, who began fretting that perhaps the boy was
too
clever: by thirteen he had written several treatises on inconsistencies in the most beloved Confucian teachings, declaring them bankrupt and meaningless. By twenty Gao had become a brilliant, embittered outcast. He apprenticed himself to an herbalist and grew obsessed with developing a medicinal formula for immortality. He died at thirty-eight, by accident, from one of his self-administered experiments.

The day after his death, a baby was born to joyful parents in the floating Byzantine city of Venexia. Tommaso, as he was called, proved so interested in the Holy Church and its mysteries that he was quickly set on the path to priesthood. He took orders at a young age and soon immersed himself in politics, rising to spiritual adviser to the Doge. It was clear to all that Tommaso would be satisfied with nothing less than the papal robes—until he was observed one evening in one of the city’s catacombs, conducting what appeared to be dark and pagan rites. Tommaso was excommunicated, tried for sorcery, and burned at the stake.

Tommaso’s ashes were still glowing in Venexia when, in Varanasi, a boy named Jayatun was born within sight of the River Ganga. Jayatun loved the stories and legends that he learned as a child, particularly that of the Cintamani, a fabulous jewel that would grant its owner any wish—and could even hold back death. When he grew older, what had been a youthful fascination became an obsession, and he set about collecting every mention he could find of the Cintamani, be the source Buddhist or Hindu or mere storyteller’s fancy. The search devoured all else, and he’d long since become a friendless pauper when one day, under the influence of a high fever, he waded into the Ganga and drowned, convinced that the river goddess had left the Cintamani there for him to find.

And so it went. As the Jinni’s flask was passed from hand to hand, so too did ibn Malik’s soul pass from body to body, in one part of the world and then another. He was a Crusader at the Siege of Jerusalem, looking for holy relics to steal. He was a student of Paracelsus, devoted to finding the Philosopher’s Stone. He was a Shinto monk, a Maori shaman, an infamous courtier in the House of Orléans. He never married, never fathered children, never so much as fell in love. Presented with a religious tradition, he was drawn to its darkest, most mystical corners; in politics, he displayed an unwavering taste for power. His lives were usually unhappy, and rarely ended well. But in each and every one he grew consumed with finding the secret to eternal life—not knowing that it was the one thing he already possessed.

Centuries went by in this way, with ibn Malik’s soul unable to pass to the next world, not so long as the Jinni still lived. Until at last, in a Prussian shtetl, a squalling infant named Yehudah was placed in his mother’s arms.

The Jinni saw all of this.

He saw himself, trapped in the flask, howling in anguish.

He saw ibn Malik born again and again.

He saw Yehudah Schaalman, the last of ibn Malik’s incarnations and the most powerful. He watched as the boy grew from student to convict to master of forbidden magic. And he watched as a lonely furniture maker came to Schaalman’s door one day, in search of a golem to make him a wife.

And Schaalman saw all of it as well.

He saw his own lives laid before him, misshapen pearls on an endless string, starting with ibn Malik and ending with himself.

He saw the Jinni’s memories, experienced his capture and defeat. He saw him emerge from the flask in a tinsmith’s shop, a hole in his memory where the Bedouin girl had been. He saw the Jinni learn his way about the city and grow accustomed to his bonds. And he watched as one night the Jinni crossed paths with a strange and astonishing woman, a woman made of clay.

26.

S
omeone was slapping the Jinni’s face. He opened his eyes and saw Conroy standing over him, blood trickling from his scalp.

So it was real. The truth of it hit him full on, the remorseless knowledge of what he’d done. He turned onto his side and curled around the pain, as he’d done on the bloodstained floor of his palace, a thousand years before.

He heard women screaming. There were shouts for a policeman, a fire engine. “Ahmad,” Conroy was saying urgently. “Come on, boyo. Get up.” Someone else groaned from close nearby. The wizard.

The Jinni lurched to his feet, swaying against Conroy. Fragments of glass slid tinkling from his clothing, joining the shards that carpeted the tiny shop. The old man lay slumped next to a display case, his body dusted with glass and tobacco. The Jinni grabbed him, dragged him up off the floor.

“Release me!”
he shouted.

The old man’s head lolled on his neck. It would be so very easy to kill him, only a quick motion, one hand to his bare throat—a fitting end, after what he’d done to Fadwa!

But the binding between them would still remain; and tomorrow, in some distant land, another child would be born. . . .

With a cry of anguish and frustration, the Jinni dropped Schaalman to the ground. The old man crumpled to the floorboards, his head knocking the side of the tobacco display.

Conroy’s hand was on his arm. “The police will be here any moment,” he said. If he felt any alarm at the Jinni’s ill treatment of a small and elderly man, he didn’t show it.

The Jinni glanced about at the shattered windows and the crowd that had gathered outside. The prostitutes from upstairs had all run panicked into the street, in various states of undress. Conroy’s men were forming a cordon in front of the door, holding everyone back as they tried to surge forward. “The police,” he said. “Your shop.” Distantly he recalled that he’d gone there intending to rob the man.

“Don’t worry about me,” Conroy said. “The constables and I have a long history together. But what about our friend here? What’s to be done with him?”

The Jinni looked down at the old man sprawled on the floor.
Fire to flesh
, he thought,
soul to soul, for as long as you shall live.
 . . .

He knew what it was he had to do.

“This man is dangerous, and a murderer,” he said to Conroy. “He killed a girl I once knew. She was only fifteen years old.” He wavered, braced himself against a countertop. “I can’t let the police find me here. There’s something I need to do. To set things right.”

Conroy eyed the Jinni for a moment, considering. Then he leaned down and punched the unconscious Schaalman across the face.

“The constables will deal with him,” said the fence. “And as far as I’m concerned you were never here. Go, now. Out the back.”

Until the moment of the blast, Saleh had been roaming the Bowery sidewalks, wondering how long he could pretend to himself that he was not in fact looking for the Jinni. He gazed into a thousand faces, grinning with delight at each and receiving a few suspicious looks in return; still, none had that familiar glow, like a shaded lamp. But would Saleh still recognize the glowing man, now that his vision was restored?

He was looking about with growing agitation when the explosion rang through the street. He felt it a moment later: a wave of pressure against his back, knocking him forward. All gasped and turned, then cried out at the falling glass.

He ran forward with the surging crowd. It was a tobacconist’s shop, nondescript, and he could see no one inside—but still, could he not guess? After the day’s events, it could hardly be a coincidence. He strained to see over the heads of the hard-looking men who’d formed a protective chain, pushing them back. The crowd was calling out for the authorities, buzzing excitedly about bombs and anarchists. A half-naked woman fell against him; he put out a hand to steady her, and she slapped it away.

There: at the alley entrance. It was the Jinni—who, Saleh saw with surprise, still glowed, if only barely. Some part of his illness still remained, then; or perhaps it was a permanent remnant, like a pox mark.

The Jinni was covered with what looked like powdered glass, which added its own eerie shimmer to his appearance. Saleh watched as he cut through the crowd and headed south, away from the fracas. Instead of his usual arrogant bearing, he seemed unsteady, even haunted.

What else could Saleh do but follow?

For the most part, the Chrystie Street tenements were still asleep as the Jinni passed them by, the gray facades stony in their silence. As he walked his new memories rose up and threatened to crush him. It seemed impossible: if a passerby had whispered the name
Fadwa al-Hadid
in his ear only an hour earlier, he’d have had no inkling of its significance.

There was little time. He knew that neither Conroy nor the police could hold Schaalman for long. Even this small errand was a luxury he probably couldn’t afford. But he had made a promise once, in a glittering gas-lit ballroom, and he meant to keep it.

He found the tenement, walked down the noxious hallway to the windowless, claustrophobic room, and knocked on the door. “Anna, please,” he told the half-awake girl who answered it.

A minute later Anna slipped out into the hallway, scowling, arms folded above her burgeoning stomach; but when she saw his expression, her own turned apprehensive. “What is it? What’s happened?”

“I apologize for waking you,” he said to her. “But I need you to deliver a message.”

He left Anna’s tenement and walked into the slowly brightening day. Overhead, the morning’s first trains creaked uptown, shedding the evening’s soot onto the streets below. He would have preferred to walk, but the Second Avenue Elevated would be faster.

He was almost at the Grand Street platform when he realized he’d been hearing the same pair of footsteps behind him for blocks. He whipped around, and a familiar figure busied itself at a nearby milliner’s window, as though admiring the summer fashions. The Jinni waited, half-amused, until the man at last gave up the pretense.

“I was better at following you when I couldn’t see,” Saleh said. “Now everything is a distraction.”

The Jinni looked him over. The man’s clothes were as awful as ever, but there was a new straightness and energy to his figure, as though he no longer gazed at the world slantwise. “What’s happened to you?” the Jinni asked.