The Old Boys (37 page)

“He
even launched eagles by himself?”

“Certainly. Of course he was larger than I and very strong. With a sharp sword he could cut a man in half with a single stroke. The bird is always held on the right arm. This strengthens it for the sword.”

He was less imperious than he had been in Paris. I was content to listen. It’s rare in my experience that a descendant of the Prophet says anything interesting in the interminable interval that it takes him to come to the point. During our lengthy friendship, Ibn Awad was rarely coherent and even more rarely came to the point. Of course his only subject was God’s will, in which my interest is limited. Kalash, on the other hand, was teaching me a lot about a practical matter.

For training purposes, Kalash was explaining, only a freshcaught wild falcon will do. It must be female because in all species of hawk the female is larger, stronger and fiercer but easier to dominate.

“She falls in love with her master,” Kalash said. “That is the object of the training. You keep her in a dark room, always hooded, with a bell tied to her leg by a leather thong. The thong is tied to the perch. Of course the bird falls asleep. You go in and speak to her in the dark. She wakes up. She must hear no other voice but yours and you must always make the same sound.”

“What sound?”

“I can’t make it or all these falcons would fly. Each time you visit the falcon and wake it up you must speak to her and give her something to eat. Raw meat at first. Then a live mouse or a pigeon. You don’t put it in the beak, you touch the bird’s legs and feathers with it and let her lunge for it. You wear a thick glove for this. You must whistle, two short notes, while she swallows. In time she will connect the sound to feeding and will grip with her talons when she hears it. After this phase you can carry her about among people to accustom her to the sound of them, then do the same with the hood off so she will see what men look like from ground level. Wild birds do not know this. Falcons always see us
from a great altitude, so they don’t realize how big we are, even though their eyesight is eight times more powerful than ours.”

He went on: Gradually the bird is accustomed to light and movement and is fed outside the dark room. She feeds in broad daylight while perched on the hunter’s arm. More training follows. Eventually she flies, kills, abandons what she kills without eating it, which is against her nature. Then she comes back to the falconer’s arm.

“The falcon does not tear and eat her victim because you have fed her before the hunt, so she is not hungry,” Kalash said. “Now she is a pure killer, killing for pleasure only and always ready to kill again. Training a virgin is quite similar. In the case of the virgin, one uses chocolate and new clothes and perfume and sometimes jewels instead of raw meat and dead pigeons. But both things happen in the dark and the voice of the master is very important. Obedience creates desire and desire creates obedience.”

Coffee was brought. Kalash drank it down, a thimbleful, then rose to his feet.

“Tomorrow we hunt,” he said.

He strode from the tent. His exit was anything but unceremonious. His bodyguards, who had been standing behind the perched falcons, followed him out, Kalashnikovs at port arms. The music stopped in mid-chord as he stepped across the threshold into the dark.

I was not alone for long. A servant entered from outside and said something rude to me in Arabic. It never occurred to him that I understood. I did not enlighten him. Smiling now, he beckoned me to follow him. He led me to a small tent. It was decorated in the same way as the dining tent, but this time with a bed in the center. The covers were turned down, as in a hotel. I was more tired than I had thought. The flights, the heavy supper, the sheer effort of listening to Kalash’s certitudes for the simple-minded, had worn me out. I undressed, washed my face in the bowl of water the servant had left, and got into bed. It was an extra-long bed. Kalash was the first host I’d ever had who was taller than me.

When I put my head on the pillow, something crackled. I looked underneath and found an aircraft map of Central Asia. I spread it out on the bed. It was a very large, detailed map. The area covered stretched from the Arabian peninsula to northern Iran and northern Afghanistan and beyond that to Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, and Xinjiang. This vast territory was essentially a patchwork of deserts. At various points on the map, airstrips had been drawn in by hand, with latitude and longitude and the length of the strip entered in a neat draftsman’s hand.

I
knew what the map meant. I thought I knew why it had been given to me. However, I wondered about the lengthy inventory of other possible motives. But not for long. I fell asleep as if drugged. Judging by my dreams, in which Mikhail assured me that absolutely no one was my friend and Kevin showed me Christopher in a box, perhaps I had been.

The stars were still out when I was awakened by the sulky servant who had put me to bed the night before. He brought tea and yogurt, flat bread and figs. I took the tea outside. Venus was large and bright among the fading constellations. Septimus Arcanus’s sky must have been something like this, but (I had read this someplace) with a Venus the size of a lemon.

Suddenly Kalash’s voice, close behind me, said, “Do you know the zodiac?”

“By heart.”

“So did Christopher. A strange expertise for a man who didn’t believe in fate. Do you believe in fate?”

“In luck, maybe.”

“Luck is the fate of the unbeliever.”

As we drove away with the windows open I heard a voice in the camp calling the faithful to prayers. Kalash paid no attention. The driver was in radio contact with someone who was telling him which way to go, where to turn. At our destination, a patch of desert that looked very much like the ground we had been driving over, we were greeted by a dozen of Kalash’s men. Half of them were wrapped in blankets against the lingering night chill. The rest carried falcons on their right arms.

“This is a good place to find the houbara bustard,” Kalash said. “Have you ever seen one?”

“Not even a picture of one.”

“Even cameras cannot see them when they do not wish to be seen.”

It was no longer dark but it was not yet light, either. The sun came up over the rim of the desert. Long rippling shadows
formed. The falcons, all hooded, did not move. The human beings had already turned their backs to the sun to protect their eyes. From the first instant you could feel its heat through your clothes. Kalash walked away very fast, heedless of the rough footing. I was able to match him stride for stride. The others trotted to keep up. A few yards farther on, two lookouts in sand-colored clothes were sprawled on their stomachs in the sand. The men behind us stopped in their tracks in unison, as if in response to a silent command. Kalash sank to his knees. He crooked a finger to me and to one of the falconers, then crept toward the lookouts up ahead. We followed and reached the lookouts in moments. They made hand signals. It was quite strange to be in the company of four Arabs and not hear a word spoken.

Kalash’s men were gazing intently at a bush about twenty yards to the front. At first I saw nothing. Then I remembered my birder’s lore and looked for shadows in the horizontal light. I spotted a likely one and followed it back to a brown speckled bird about the size of a partridge but with a longer neck and longer legs and pointier beak. It was frozen in position, head thrust forward, one leg raised. Its camouflage was amazing. It looked like nothing living—like a divot gouged from the desert floor. Without the shadow as guide I might never have seen it, though I have spent many happy moments sorting birds out of foliage. I snorted in admiration.

Kalash did not see the houbara yet, but he knew by the noise I had just made that I did. He rose to his feet and took the falcon from its bearer, who removed its hood in the same motion as the one with which he passed the bird to Kalash. The lookouts also stood up and ran toward the houbara. It fled—not into the air but across the ground, moving at almost unbelievable speed for a two-legged animal. Outside of Road Runner cartoons, I had never seen a bird move so fast afoot. One of the lookouts fired a gun at it. He missed, then missed again. I realized that he was trying to make it fly rather than hit it. A third
round kicked up dirt about two feet to the bird’s left. At last the houbara took flight.

It flew like a woodcock, fast and close to the ground, zig-zagging around obstacles as if equipped with sonar. Another shot. The houbara climbed. The sun had been up for less than ten minutes but already the sky was an inverted bowl of indigo, utterly cloudless, fingernail moon still visible on the western horizon, pinprick Venus to the east. Even when climbing the houbara flew very fast. When it was between the horns of the moon from our perspective, Kalash gave a two-note whistle and released the falcon. It rose into the sky quicker than the houbara and in seconds was above it.

The falcon then dived, overcoming the resistance of the wind with its big wings. Kalash had been quite right. What was happening was beyond photography’s power to capture or even suggest. The falcon fell, the houbara took desperate evasive action. The falcon drove its prey back toward Kalash, who had taken off his sunglasses and was gazing upward, his ebony face shining in rapture. The falcon, talons extended, hit the houbara bustard at speed that I would call blinding except that the opposite was true. At the moment of impact the many elements of the image fragmented. Talons gripped, the houbara twisted in agony, feathers exploded, blood spurted then separated into a spume of vermilion droplets. The falcon’s beak struck, the houbara went limp. The falcon, gripping its prey in its talons, braked its fall with outspread wings.

The falcon dropped its prey several hundred meters to our front. All four of the servants ran toward the spot, human retrievers gone to collect the kill. Kalash waited calmly, arm outstretched, face lifted toward the circling falcon. He whistled. After what seemed a long time but was probably less than a minute, the falcon settled onto Kalash’s arm. Its curved beak was bloody; so were the feathers on its breast. Kalash gave the bird a piece of meat and spoke to it in a kind of wordless baby talk. The bird’s eye was exactly as Zarah had described it,
without memory or mercy. If it remembered anything, I thought, it remembered its dinosaur ancestor doing to the houbara’s ancestor what the two of them had just reenacted in a new world where everything was smaller but outcomes were the same.

Kalash said, “Did you see everything?”

“I doubt it. But enough.”

“Enough?” He paused. “I’m glad to hear that because it’s time for you to go. Captain Khaldun will fly you to Cairo.”

“All right, thank you for letting me see this.”

“Remember it and you will understand other things. You understand the map?”

“I think so. It shows the flight path of the houbara bustard’s winter migration.”

“You understood. Ibn Awad is an enthusiastic falconer—or did you perhaps already know that? He follows the houbara. It is his only pleasure.”

Kalash looked at me for a long moment. “I can’t help you more than this and still meet my cousin in paradise,” he said.

If he was being sardonic I saw no sign of it. I held my tongue. Questions would have been useless even if I had any. As for expressions of gratitude, I supposed that thanking one descendant of the Prophet for betraying another is bad form. Bad Kismet, too, probably.

Kalash said, “Don’t procrastinate. Ibn Awad is enjoying himself now, but when the houbara are home again, a short time from now, he will act.”

The lookouts and the bodyguards approached, one of them holding the dead houbara at arm’s length by the feet, the others grinning in celebration.

Kalash said, “Remember, he’s an old man to whom you owe something for the inconvenience you have already caused him. No assassins this time. Fate will not permit an assassin to succeed. No bullets, no sword, no humiliation. A new Saint Helena’s, but warmer, and with more intelligent guards.”

He
put on his sunglasses and handed off the falcon to its bearer. The lookouts were already far ahead of us, scouting for more houbara bustards.