"Who is that?" I asked a man near me.
"It is Ha"arud al-Emwiya, the Sufi," the man told me, never lowering his eyes from the tower above.
"Is he caught up there?" I demanded. "Will he not fall?"
"Watch," was all the man said. I did.
A moment later, much to my horror, the small dark figure of Ha"arud the Sufi seemed to go rigid, then toppled from the minaret"s rim like a stone. I gasped in shock, and so did a few others around me, but the rest of the crowd only stood in hushed attention.
Then an incredible thing happened. The tumbling holy man spread his arms out from his shoulders, like a bird"s wings, and his downward fall became a swooping glide. He bottomed out high above the crowd, then sped upward, riding the wind like a leaf, spinning, somersaulting, stopping at last to drift to the ground as gently as a bit of eiderdown. Meanwhile, all the a.s.sembly was chanting "G.o.d is great! G.o.d is great!" When the Sufi had touched the earth with his bare feet the people surrounded him, touching his rough woolen garments and crying out his name. He said nothing, only stood and smiled, and before too long the people began to wander away, talking amongst themselves.
"But this is truly marvelous!" I said to the man who stood by me.
"Before every holy day he flies," the man said, and shrugged. "I am surprised this is the first time you have heard of Ha"arud al-Emwiya."
I was determined to speak to this amazing man, and as the crowd dispersed I approached and asked if I might buy him a gla.s.s of tea. Close up he had a look of seamed roguishness that seemed surprising placed against the great favor in which Allah must have held him. He smilingly agreed, and accompanied me to a tea shop close by in the Street of Weavers.
"How is it, if you will pardon my forwardness, that you of all holy men are so gifted?"
He looked up from the tea cupped in his palms and grinned. He had only two teeth. "Balance," he said.
I was surprised. "A cat has balance," I responded, "but they nevertheless must wait for the pigeons to land."
"I refer to a different sort of balance," he said. "The balance between Allah and Shaitan, which, as you know, Allah the All-Knowing has created as an equilibrium of exquisite delicacy."
"Explain please, master." I called for wine, but Ha"arud refused any himself.
"In all things care must be exercised," he explained. "Thus it is too with my flying. Many men holier than I are as earthbound as stones. Many other men have lived so poorly as to shame the Devil himself, yet they cannot take to the air, either. Only I, if I may be excused what sounds self-satisfied, have discovered perfect balance. Thus, each year before the holy days I tot up my score carefully, committing small peccadilloes or acts of faith as needed until the balance is exactly, exactly balanced. Thus, when I jump from the mosque, neither Allah nor the Arch-Enemy has claim on my soul, and they bear me up until a later date, at which time the issue shall be clearer." He smiled again and drained his tea.
"You are... a sort of chessboard on which G.o.d and the Devil contend?" I asked, perplexed.
"A flying chessboard, yes."
We talked for a long while, as the shadows grew long across the Street of the Weavers, but the Sufi Ha"arud adhered stubbornly to his explanation. I must have seemed disbelieving, for he finally proposed that we ascend to the top of the mosque so he could demonstrate.
I was more than a little drunk, and he, imbibing only tea, was filled nonetheless with a strange gleefulness. We made our way up the many winding stairs and climbed out onto the narrow ledge that circled the minaret like a crown. The cool night air, and the thousands of winking lights of Alexandria far below, sobered me rapidly. "I suddenly find all your precepts very sound," I said. "Let us go down."
But Ha"arud would have none of it, and proceeded to step lightly off the edge of the dome. He hovered, like a b.u.mblebee, a hundred feet above the dusty street. "Balance," he said with great satisfaction.
"But," I asked, "is the good deed of giving me this demonstration enough to offset the pride with which you exhibit your skill?" I was cold and wanted to get down, and hoped to shorten the exhibition.
Instead, hearing my question, Ha"arud screwed up his face as though it was something he had not given thought to. A moment later, with a shriek of surprise, he plummeted down out of my sight to smash on the mosque"s stone steps, as dead as dead.
Ibn Fahad, having lost himself in remembering the story, poked at the campfire. "Thus, the problem with matters of delicate balance," he said, and shook his head.
The whispering rustle of our dark visitor brought us sharply back. "Interesting," the creature rasped. "Sad, yes. Sad enough? We shall see. Who is the next of your number?"
A cold chill, like fever, swept over me at those calm words.
"I... I am next..." said Fawn, voice taut as a bowstring. "Shall I begin?"
The vampyr said nothing, only bobbed the black lump of his head. The youth cleared his throat and began.
Fawn"s Story There was once... [Fawn began, and hesitated, then started again.] There was once a young prince named Zufik, the second son of a great sultan. Seeing no prospects for himself in his father"s kingdom, he went out into the wild world to search for his fortune. He traveled through many lands, and saw many strange things, and heard tell of others stranger still.
In one place he was told of a nearby sultanate, the ruler of which had a beautiful daughter, his only child and the very apple of his eye.
Now this country had been plagued for several years by a terrible beast, a great white leopard of a kind never seen before. So fearsome it was that it had killed hunters set to trap it, yet was it also so cunning that it had stolen babies from their very cradles as the mothers lay sleeping. The people of the sultanate were all in fear; and the sultan, whose best warriors had tried and failed to kill the beast, was driven to despair. Finally, at the end of his wits, he had it proclaimed in the market place that the man who could destroy the white leopard would be gifted with the sultan"s daughter Ra.s.soril, and with her the throne of the sultanate after the old man was gone.
Young Zufik heard how the best young men of the country, and others from countries beyond, one after the other had met their deaths beneath the claws of the leopard, or... or... in its jaws....
[Here I saw the boy falter, as if the vision of flashing teeth he was conjuring had suddenly reminded him of our predicament. Walid the under-vizier reached out and patted the lad"s shoulder with great gentleness, until he was calm enough to resume.]
So... [He swallowed.] So young Prince Zufik took himself into that country, and soon was announced at the sultan"s court.
The ruler was a tired old man, the fires in his sunken eyes long quenched. Much of the power seemed to have been handed over to a pale, narrow-faced youth named Sifaz, who was the princess"s cousin. As Zufik announced his purpose, as so many had done before him, Sifaz"s eyes flashed.
"You will no doubt meet the end all the others have, but you are welcome to the attempt-and the prize, should you win."
Then for the first time Zufik saw the Princess Ra.s.soril, and in an instant his heart was overthrown.
She had hair as black and shiny as polished jet, and a face upon which Allah himself must have looked in satisfaction, thinking: "Here is the summit of My art." Her delicate hands were like tiny doves as they nested in her lap, and a man could fall into her brown eyes and drown without hope of rescue-which is what Zufik did, and he was not wrong when he thought he saw Ra.s.soril return his ardent gaze.
Sifaz saw, too, and his thin mouth turned in something like a smile, and he narrowed his yellow eyes. "Take this princeling to his room, that he may sleep now and wake with the moon. The leopard"s cry was heard around the palace"s walls last night."
Indeed, when Zufik woke in the evening darkness, it was to hear the choking cry of the leopard beneath his very window. As he looked out, buckling on his scabbard, it was to see a white shape slipping in and out of the shadows in the garden below. He took also his dagger in his hand and leaped over the threshold.
He had barely touched ground when, with a terrible snarl, the leopard bounded out of the obscurity of the hedged garden wall and came to a stop before him. It was huge-bigger than any leopard Zufik had seen or heard of-and its pelt gleamed like ivory. It leaped, claws flashing, and he could barely throw himself down in time as the beast pa.s.sed over him like a cloud, touching him only with its hot breath. It turned and leaped again as the palace dogs set up a terrible barking, and this time its talons raked his chest, knocking him tumbling. Blood started from his shirt, spouting so fiercely that he could scarcely draw himself to his feet. He was caught with his back against the garden wall; the leopard slowly moved toward him, yellow eyes like tallow lamps burning in the niches of h.e.l.l.
Suddenly there was a crashing at the far end of the garden: the dogs had broken down their stall and were even now speeding through the trees. The leopard hesitated-Zufik could almost see it thinking-and then, with a last snarl, it leaped onto the wall and disappeared into the night.
Zufik was taken, his wounds bound, and he was put into his bed. The princess Ra.s.soril, who had truly lost her heart to him, wept bitterly at his side, begging him to go back to his father"s land and to give up the fatal challenge. But Zufik, weak as he was, would no more think of yielding than he would of theft or treason, and refused, saying he would hunt the beast again the following night. Sifaz grinned and led the princess away. Zufik thought he heard the pale cousin whistling as he went.
In the dark before dawn Zufik, who could not sleep owing to the pain of his injury, heard his door quietly open. He was astonished to see the princess come in, gesturing him to silence. When the door was closed she threw herself down at his side and covered his hand and cheek with kisses, proclaiming her love for him and begging him again to go. He admitted his love for her, but reminded her that his honor would not permit him to stop short of his goal, even should he die in the trying.
Ra.s.soril, seeing that there was no changing the young prince"s mind, then took from her robe a black arrow tipped in silver, fletched with the tail feathers of a falcon. "Then take this," she said. "This leopard is a magic beast, and you will never kill it otherwise. Only silver will pierce its heart. Take the arrow and you may fulfill your oath." So saying, she slipped out of his room.
The next night Zufik again heard the leopard"s voice in the garden below, but this time he took also his bow and arrow when he went to meet it. At first he was loath to use it, since it seemed somehow unmanly; but when the beast had again given him injury and he had struck three sword blows in turn without effect, he at last nocked the silver-pointed shaft on his bowstring and, as the beast charged him once more, let fly. The black arrow struck to the leopard"s heart; the creature gave a hideous cry and again leaped the fence, this time leaving a trail of its mortal blood behind it.
When morning came Zufik went to the sultan for men, so that they could follow the track of blood to the beast"s lair and prove its death. The sultan was displeased when his vizier, the princess"s pale cousin, did not answer his summons. As they were all going down into the garden, though, there came a great cry from the sleeping rooms upstairs, a cry like a soul in mortal agony. With fear in their hearts Zufik, the sultan, and all the men rushed upstairs. There they found the missing Sifaz.
The pale man lifted a shaking, red-smeared finger to point at Zufik, as all the company stared in horror.
"He has done it-the foreigner!" Sifaz shouted.
In Sifaz"s arms lay the body of the Princess Ra.s.soril, a black arrow standing from her breast.
After Fawn finished there was a long silence. The boy, his own courage perhaps stirred by his story, seemed to sit straighter.
"Ah..." the vampyr said at last, "love and its prices-that is the message? Or is it perhaps the effect of silver on the supernatural? Fear not, I am bound by no such conventions, and fear neither silver, steel, nor any other metal." The creature made a huffing, sc.r.a.ping sound that might have been a laugh. I marveled anew, even as I felt the skein of my life fraying, that it had so quickly gained such command of our unfamiliar tongue.
"Well..." it said slowly. "Sad. But... sad enough? Again, that is the important question. Who is your last... contestant?"
Now my heart truly went cold within me, and I sat as though I had swallowed a stone. Walid al-Salameh spoke up.
"I am," he said, and took a deep breath. "I am."
The Vizier"s Story This is a true story-or so I was told. It happened in my grandfather"s time, and he had it from someone who knew those involved. He told it to me as a cautionary tale.
There once was an old caliph, a man of rare gifts and good fortune. He ruled a small country, but a wealthy one-a country upon which all the gifts of Allah had been showered in grand measure. He had the finest heir a man could have, dutiful and yet courageous, beloved by the people almost as extravagantly as the caliph himself. He had many other fine sons, and two hundred beautiful wives, and an army of fighting men the envy of his neighbors. His treasury was stacked roofbeam-high with gold and gemstones and blocks of fragrant sandalwood, crisscrossed with ivories and bolts of the finest cloth. His palace was built around a spring of fragrant, clear water; and everyone said that they must be the very Waters of Life, so fortunate and well-loved this caliph was. His only sadness was that age had robbed his sight from him, leaving him blind, but hard as this was, it was a small price to pay for Allah"s beneficence.
One day the caliph was walking in his garden, smelling the exquisite fragrance of the blossoming orange trees. His son the prince, unaware of his father"s presence, was also in the garden, speaking with his mother, the caliph"s first and chiefest wife.
"He is terribly old," the wife said. "I cannot stand even to touch him anymore. It is a horror to me."
"You are right, mother," the son replied, as the caliph hid behind the trees and listened, shocked. "I am sickened by watching him sitting all day, drooling into his bowl, or staggering sightless through the palace. But what are we to do?"
"I have thought on it long and hard," the caliph"s wife replied. "We owe it to ourselves and those close to us to kill him."
"Kill him?" the son replied. "Well, it is hard for me, but I suppose you are right. I still feel some love for him, though-may we at least do it quickly, so that he shall not feel pain at the end?"
"Very well. But do it soon-tonight, even. If I must feel his foul breath upon me one more night I will die myself."
"Tonight, then," the son agreed, and the two walked away, leaving the blind caliph shaking with rage and terror behind the orange trees. He could not see what sat on the garden path behind them, the object of their discussion: the wife"s old lap-dog, a scrofulous creature of extreme age.
Thus the caliph went to his vizier, the only one he was sure he could trust in a world of suddenly traitorous sons and wives, and bade him to have the pair arrested and quickly beheaded. The vizier was shocked, and asked the reason why, but the caliph only said he had una.s.sailable proof that they intended to murder him and take his throne. He bade the vizier go and do the deed.
The vizier did as he was directed, seizing the son and his mother quickly and quietly, then giving them over to the headsman after tormenting them for confessions and the names of confederates, neither of which were forthcoming.
Sadly, the vizier went to the caliph and told him it was done, and the old man was satisfied. But soon, inevitably, word of what had happened spread, and the brothers of the heir began to murmur among themselves about their father"s deed. Many thought him mad, since the dead pair"s devotion to the caliph was common knowledge.
Word of this dissension reached the caliph himself, and he began to fear for his life, terrified that his other sons meant to emulate their treasonous brother. He called the vizier to him and demanded the arrest of these sons, and their beheading. The vizier argued in vain, risking his own life, but the caliph would not be swayed; at last the vizier went away, returning a week later a battered, shaken man.
"It is done, O Prince," he said. "All your sons are dead."
The caliph had only a short while in which to feel safe before the extreme wrath of the wives over the slaughter of their children reached his ears. "Destroy them, too!" the blind caliph insisted.
Again the vizier went away, soon to return.
"It is done, O Prince," he reported. "Your wives have been beheaded."
Soon the courtiers were crying murder, and the caliph sent his vizier to see them dealt with as well.
"It is done, O Prince," he a.s.sured the caliph. But the ruler now feared the angry townspeople, so he commanded his vizier to take the army and slaughter them. The vizier argued feebly, then went away.
"It is done, O Prince," the caliph was told a month later. But now the caliph realized that with his heirs and wives gone, and the important men of the court dead, it was the soldiers themselves who were a threat to his power. He commanded his vizier to sow lies amongst them, causing them to fall out and slay each other, then locked himself in his room to safely outlast the conflict. After a month and a half the vizier knocked upon his door.
"It is done, O Prince."
For a moment the caliph was satisfied. All his enemies were dead, and he himself was locked in: no one could murder him, or steal his treasure, or usurp his throne. The only person yet alive who even knew where the caliph hid was... his vizier.
Blind, he groped about for the key with which he had locked himself in. Better first to remove the risk that someone might trick him into coming out. He pushed the key out beneath the door and told the vizier to throw it away somewhere it might never be found. When the vizier returned he called him close to the locked portal that bounded his small world of darkness and safety.
"Vizier," the caliph said through the keyhole, "I command you to go and kill yourself, for you are the last one living who is a threat to me."
"Kill myself, my prince?" the vizier asked, dumbfounded. "Kill myself?"
"Correct," the caliph said. "Now go and do it. That is my command."
There was a long silence. At last the vizier said: "Very well." After that there was silence.
For a long time the caliph sat in his blindness and exulted, for everyone he distrusted was gone. His faithful vizier had carried out all his orders, and now had killed himself....
A sudden, horrible thought came to him then: What if the vizier had not done what he had told him to do? What if instead he had made compact with the caliph"s enemies, and was only reporting false details when he told of their deaths? How was the caliph to know? He almost swooned with fright and anxiousness at the realization.
At last he worked up the courage to feel his way across the locked room to the door. He put his ear to the keyhole and listened. He heard nothing but silence. He took a breath and then put his mouth to the hole.
"Vizier?" he called in a shaky voice. "Have you done what I commanded? Have you killed yourself?"
"It is done, O Prince," came the reply.
Finishing his story, which was fully as dreadful as it was sad, the under-vizier Walid lowered his head as if ashamed or exhausted. We waited tensely for our guest to speak; at the same time I am sure we all vainly hoped there would be no more speaking, that the creature would simply vanish, like a frightening dream that flees the sun.
"Rather than discuss the merits of your sad tales," the black, tattered shadow said at last-confirming that there would be no waking from this dream-"rather than argue the game with only one set of moves completed, perhaps it is now time for me to speak. The night is still youthful, and my tale is not long, but I wish to give you a fair time to render judgment."
As he spoke the creature"s eyes bloomed scarlet like unfolding roses. The mist curled up from the ground beyond the fire-circle, wrapping the vampyr in a cloak of writhing fogs, a rotted black egg in a bag of silken mesh.
"... May I begin?" it asked... but no one could say a word. "Very well...."
The Vampyr"s Story The tale I will tell is of a child, a child born of an ancient city on the banks of a river. So long ago this was that not only has the city itself long gone to dust, but the later cities built atop its ruins, tiny towns and great walled fortresses of stone, all these too have gone beneath the mill-wheels of time-rendered, like their predecessor, into the finest of particles to blow in the wind, silting the timeless river"s banks.
This child lived in a mud hut thatched with straw, and played with his fellows in the shallows of the sluggish brown river while his mother washed the family"s clothes and gossiped with her neighbors.
Even this ancient city was built upon the bones of earlier cities, and it was into the collapsed remnants of one-a great, tumbled ma.s.s of shattered sandstone-that the child and his friends sometimes went. And it was to these ruins that the child, when he was a little older... almost the age of your young, romantic companion... took a pretty, doe-eyed girl.
It was to be his first time beyond the veil-his initiation into the mysteries of women. His heart beat rapidly; the girl walked ahead of him, her slender brown body tiger-striped with light and shade as she walked among the broken pillars. Then she saw something, and screamed. The child came running.
The girl was nearly mad, weeping and pointing. He stopped in amazement, staring at the black, shrivelled thing that lay on the ground-a twisted something that might have been a man once, wizened and black as a piece of leather dropped into the cookfire. Then the thing opened its eyes.
The girl ran, choking-but he did not, seeing that the black thing could not move. The twitching of its mouth seemed that of someone trying to speak; he thought he heard a faint voice asking for help, begging for him to do something. He leaned down to the near-silent hiss, and the thing squirmed and bit him, fastening its sharp teeth like barbed fishhooks in the muscle of his leg. The man-child screamed, helpless, and felt his blood running out into the horrible sucking mouth of the thing. Fetid saliva crept into the wounds and coursed hotly through his body, even as he struggled against his writhing attacker. The poison climbed through him, and it seemed he could feel his own heart flutter and die within his chest, delicate and hopeless as a broken bird. With final, desperate strength the child pulled free. The black thing, mouth gaping, curled on itself and shuddered, like a beetle on a hot stone. A moment later it had crumbled into ashes and oily flakes.
But it had caught me long enough to destroy me-for of course I was that child-to force its foul fluids into me, leeching my humanity and replacing it with the hideous, unwanted wine of immortality. My child"s heart became an icy fist.
Thus was I made what I am, at the hands of a dying vampyr-which had been a creature like I am now. Worn down at last by the pa.s.sing of millennia, it had chosen a host to receive its hideous malady, then died-as I shall do someday, no doubt, in the grip of some terrible, blind, insect-like urge... but not soon. Not today.
So that child, which had been in all ways like other children-loved by its family, loving in turn noise and games and sweetmeats-became a dark thing sickened by the burning light of the sun.
Driven into the damp shadows beneath stones and the dusty gloom of abandoned places, then driven out again beneath the moon by an unshakeable, irresistable hunger, I fed first on my family-my uncomprehending mother wept to see her child returned, standing by her moonlit pallet-then on the others of my city. Not last, or least painful of my feedings was on the dark-haired girl who had run when I stayed behind. I slashed other throats, too, and lapped up warm, sea-salty blood while the trapped child inside me cried without a sound. It was as though I stood behind a screen, unable to leave or interfere as terrible crimes were committed before me....