The Satanic Verses (18 page)

           
"This is a gathering of many poets," he says clearly, "and I
cannot claim to be one of them. But I am the Messenger, and I bring verses from
a greater One than any here assembled."

           
The audience is losing patience. Religion is for the temple; Jahilians and
pilgrims alike are here for entertainment. Silence the fellow! Throw him
out!―But Abu Simbel speaks again. "If your God has really spoken to
you," he says, "then all the world must hear it." And in an
instant the silence in the great tent is complete.

           
"
The Star
," Mahound cries out, and the scribes begin to write.

           
"In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful!

           
"By the Pleiades when they set: Your companion is not in error; neither is
he deviating.

           
"Nor does he speak from his own desires. It is a revelation that has been
revealed: one mighty in power has taught him.

           
"He stood on the high horizon: the lord of strength. Then he came close,
closer than the length of two bows, and revealed to his servant that which is
revealed.

           
"The servant's heart was true when seeing what he saw. Do you, then, dare
to question what was seen?

           
"I saw him also at the lote-tree of the uttermost end, near which lies the
Garden of Repose. When that tree was covered by its covering, my eye was not
averted, neither did my gaze wander; and I saw some of the greatest signs of
the Lord."

           
At this point, without any trace of hesitation or doubt, he recites two further
verses.

           
"Have you thought upon Lat and Uzza, and Manat, the third, the
other?"―After the first verse, Hind gets to her feet; the Grandee of
Jahilia is already standing very straight. And Mahound, with silenced eyes,
recites: "They are the exalted birds, and their intercession is desired
indeed."

           
As the noise―shouts, cheers, scandal, cries of devotion to the goddess
Al-Lat―swells and bursts within the marquee, the already astonished
congregation beholds the doubly sensational spectacle of the Grandee Abu Simbel
placing his thumbs upon the lobes of his ears, fanning out the fingers of both
hands and uttering in a loud voice the formula: "Allahu Akbar." After
which he falls to his knees and presses a deliberate forehead to the ground.
His wife, Hind, immediately follows his lead.

           
The water-carrier Khalid has remained by the open tent-flap throughout these
events. Now he stares in horror as everyone gathered there, both the crowd in
the tent and the overflow of men and women outside it, begins to kneel, row by
row, the movement rippling outwards from Hind and the Grandee as though they
were pebbles thrown into a lake; until the entire gathering, outside the tent
as well as in, kneels bottom-in-air before the shuteye Prophet who has
recognized the patron deities of the town. The Messenger himself remains
standing, as if loth to join the assembly in its devotions. Bursting into
tears, the water-carrier flees into the empty heart of the city of the sands.
His teardrops, as he runs, burn holes in the earth, as if they contain some
harsh corrosive acid.

           
Mahound remains motionless. No trace of moisture can be detected on the lashes
of his unopened eyes.

           
* * * * *

           
On that night of the desolating triumph of the businessman in the tent of the
unbelievers, there take place certain murders for which the first lady of
Jahilia will wait years to take her terrible revenge.

           
The Prophet's uncle Hamza has been walking home alone, his head bowed and grey
in the twilight of that melancholy victory, when he hears a roar and looks up,
to see a gigantic scarlet lion poised to leap at him from the high battlements
of the city. He knows this beast, this fable.
The iridescence of its scarlet
hide blends into the shimmering brightness of the desert sands. Through its
nostrils it exhales the horror of the lonely places of the earth. It spits out
pestilence, and when armies venture into the desert, it consumes them utterly
.
Through the blue last light of evening he shouts at the beast, preparing,
unarmed as he is, to meet his death. "Jump, you bastard, manticore. I've
strangled big cats with my bare hands, in my time." When I was younger.
When I was young.

           
There is laughter behind him, and distant laughter echoing, or so it seems,
from the battlements. He looks around him; the manticore has vanished from the
ramparts. He is surrounded by a group of Jahilians in fancy dress, returning
from the fair and giggling. "Now that these mystics have embraced our Lat,
they are seeing new gods round every corner, no?" Hamza, understanding
that the night will be full of terrors, returns home and calls for his battle
sword. "More than anything in the world," he growls at the papery
valet who has served him in war and peace for forty-four years, "I hate
admitting that my enemies have a point. Damn sight better to kill the bastards,
I've always thought. Neatest bloody solution." The sword has remained
sheathed in its leather scabbard since the day of his conversion by his nephew,
but tonight, he confides to the valet, "The lion is loose. Peace will have
to wait."

           
It is the last night of the festival of Ibrahim. Jahilia is masquerade and
madness. The oiled fatty bodies of the wrestlers have completed their writhings
and the seven poems have been nailed to the walls of the House of the Black
Stone. Now singing whores replace the poets, and dancing whores, also with oiled
bodies, are at work as well; night-wrestling replaces the daytime variety. The
courtesans dance and sing in golden, bird-beaked masks, and the gold is
reflected in their clients' shining eyes. Gold, gold everywhere, in the palms
of the profiteering Jahilians and their libidinous guests, in the flaming
sand-braziers, in the glowing walls of the night city. Hamza walks dolorously
through the streets of gold, past pilgrims who lie unconscious while cutpurses
earn their living. He hears the wine-blurred carousing through every
golden-gleaming doorway, and feels the song and howling laughter and
coin-chinkings hurting him like mortal insults. But he doesn't find what he's
looking for, not here, so he moves away from the illuminated revelry of gold
and begins to stalk the shadows, hunting the apparition of the lion.

           
And finds, after hours of searching, what he knew would be waiting, in a dark
corner of the city's outer walls, the thing of his vision, the red manticore
with the triple row of teeth. The manticore has blue eyes and a mannish face
and its voice is half- trumpet and half-flute. It is fast as the wind, its
nails are corkscrew talons and its tail hurls poison quills. It loves to
feed on human flesh . . . a brawl is taking place. Knives hissing in the
silence, at times the clash of metal against metal. Hamza recognizes the men
under attack: Khalid, Salman, Bilal. A lion himself now, Hamza draws his sword,
roars the silence into shreds, runs forward as fast as sixty-year-old legs will
go. His friends' assailants are unrecognizable behind their masks.

           
It has been a night of masks. Walking the debauched Jahilian streets, his heart
full of bile, Hamza has seen men and women in the guise of eagles, jackals,
horses, gryphons, salamanders, wart- hogs, rocs; welling up from the murk of
the alleys have come two-headed amphisbaenae and the winged bulls known as
Assyrian sphinxes. Djinns, houris, demons populate the city on this night of
phantasmagoria and lust. But only now, in this dark place, does he see the red
masks he's been looking for. The manlion masks: he rushes towards his fate.

           
* * * * *

           
In the grip of a self-destructive unhappiness the three disciples had started
drinking, and owing to their unfamiliarity with alcohol they were soon not just
intoxicated but stupid-drunk. They stood in a small piazza and started abusing
the passers-by, and after a while the water-carrier Khalid brandished his
water- skin, boasting. He could destroy the city, he carried the ultimate
weapon. Water: it would cleanse Jahilia the filthy, wash it away, so that a new
start could be made from the purified white sand. That was when the lion-men
started chasing them, and after a long pursuit they were cornered, the
booziness draining out of them on account of their fear, they were staring into
the red masks of death when Hamza arrived just in time.

           
. . . Gibreel floats above the city watching the fight. It's quickly over once
Hamza gets to the scene. Two masked assailants run away, two lie dead. Bilal,
Khalid and Salman have been cut, but not too badly. Graver than their wounds is
the news behind the lion-masks of the dead. "Hind's brothers," Hamza
recognizes. "Things are finishing for us now."

           
Slayers of manticores, water-terrorists, the followers of Mahound sit and weep
in the shadow of the city wall.

           
* * * * *

           
As for him, Prophet Messenger Businessman: his eyes are open now. He paces the inner
courtyard of his house, his wife's house, and will not go in to her. She is
almost seventy and feels these days more like a mother than a. She, the rich
woman, who employed him to manage her caravans long ago. His management skills
were the first things she liked about him. And after a time, they were in love.
It isn't easy to be a brilliant, successful woman in a city where the gods are
female but the females are merely goods. Men had either been afraid of her, or
had thought her so strong that she didn't need their consideration. He hadn't
been afraid, and had given her the feeling of constancy she needed. While he,
the orphan, found in her many women in one: mother sister lover sibyl friend.
When he thought himself crazy she was the one who believed in his visions.
"It is the archangel," she told him, "not some fog out of your
head. It is Gibreel, and you are the Messenger of God."

           
He can't won't see her now. She watches him through a stonelatticed window. He can't
stop walking, moves around the courtyard in a random sequence of unconscious
geometries, his footsteps tracing out a series of ellipses, trapeziums,
rhomboids, ovals, rings. While she remembers how he would return from the
caravan trails full of stories heard at wayside oases. A prophet, Isa, born to
a woman named Maryam, born of no man under a palm-tree in the desert. Stories
that made his eyes shine, then fade into a distantness. She recalls his
excitability: the passion with which he'd argue, all night if necessary, that
the old nomadic times had been better than this city of gold where people
exposed their baby daughters in the wilderness. In the old tribes even the
poorest orphan would be cared for. God is in the desert, he'd say, not here in
this miscarriage of a place. And she'd reply, Nobody's arguing, my love, it's
late, and tomorrow there are the accounts.

           
She has long ears; has already heard what he said about Lat, Uzza, Manat. So
what? In the old days he wanted to protect the baby daughters of Jahilia; why
shouldn't he take the daughters of Allah under his wing as well? But after
asking herself this question she shakes her head and leans heavily on the cool
wall beside her stone-screened window. While below her, her husband walks in
pentagons, parallelograms, six-pointed stars, and then in abstract and
increasingly labyrinthine patterns for which there are no names, as though
unable to find a simple line.

           
When she looks into the courtyard some moments later, however, he has gone.

           
* * * * *

           
The Prophet wakes between silk sheets, with a bursting headache, in a room he
has never seen. Outside the window the sun is near its savage zenith, and
silhouetted against the whiteness is a tall figure in a black hooded cloak,
singing softly in a strong, low voice. The song is one that the women of
Jahilia chorus as they drum the men to war.

           
Advance and we embrace you,

           
embrace you, embrace you,

           
advance and we embrace you

           
and soft carpets spread.

           
Turn back and we desert you,

           
we leave you, desert you,

           
retreat and we'll not love you,

           
not in love's bed.

           
He recognizes Hind's voice, sits up, and finds himself naked beneath the creamy
sheet. He calls to her: "Was I attacked?" Hind turns to him, smiling
her Hind smile. "Attacked?" she mimics him, and claps her hands for
breakfast. Minions enter, bring, serve, remove, scurry off. Mahound is helped
into a silken robe of black and gold; Hind, exaggeratedly, averts her eyes.
"My head," he asks again. "Was I struck?" She stands at the
window, her head hung low, playing the demure maid. "Oh, Messenger,
Messenger," she mocks him. "What an ungallant Messenger it is. Couldn't
you have come to my room consciously, of your own will? No, of course not, I
repel you, I'm sure." He will not play her game. "Am I a
prisoner?" he asks, and again she laughs at him. "Don't be a
fool." And then, shrugging, relents: "I was walking the city streets
last night, masked, to see the festivities, and what should I stumble over but
your unconscious body? Like a drunk in the gutter, Mahound. I sent my servants
for a litter and brought you home. Say thank you."