The Western Lands

  "It is expensive, meester, you will see. I will guide you to my commission."

  "Neferti! You honor my humble shop."

  The old man stands up, in all his courtly insolence. "But how could I"—he rubs his hands—"be of service to you?"

  "I have need of a cloak."

  The old man's face goes blank and cold.

  "What you ask is illegal."

  "Is not anything of value illegal?"

  The old man's face relaxes into contented depravity.

  "Of course, one must always take the Big Picture. . . . Yes, I have what you need. See for yourself."

  They move into a vault. Suspended on elaborate frameworks to simulate the client, in this case lithe and thin and six feet in height, are the Cloaks of Darkness and Invisibility. Like thick black velvet, gathering always more darkness, they can suck the light out of a room or a street.

  Neferti slips into a tight sweater. He fingers a djellaba of a blue-black color. There are boots from ankle to hip.

  "The clothes of darkness, señor. Yes, come in many sizes. Here is a cloak to be worn at dusk and dawn, gray-black as you see, always the thick velvet feel, with gray-white velvet in the morning light, the black velvet lingering in corners like a fog of underexposed film, a path of darkness. Capes . . . yes, to be whipped about one, throwing swirls of darkness, and slim-fitting invisibles, tight pants, turtleneck and Russian hat. It's terribly dashing. But the old-time capes are still popular, how you can swish them around . . . a great swish of velvety darkness knocks the stupid words out of a redneck mouth with his bloody teeth."

  Neferti adjusts the cloak about his shoulders. Soft and light as air, it settles around his body, molding to every contour. The hat is like a wig, fitting across the forehead and down the back of the neck below the cloak, and the ankle-high boots walk on layers and cushions of darkness.

  He steps out into the areade of the market. It is late afternoon. Many of the stalls are empty. The palpable silence of an empty market, the heavy absence of many voices, all manner of men on their way to buy and sell, all absent, not even the shrug of negation or a ripple of water.

  Those who have been raised in the market can distinguish what manner of merchant is there by the particular silence in his empty stall or shop or the accustomed place under the colonnades where he spreads out his wares. For a man is delineated more clearly by what he is not than by what he is, as if cut from stone by the mason's chisel. A moving tunnel of silence left by the water seller, a cool silence that is not thirst.

  Here is the silence of a loud-mouthed cripple selling worthless merchandise. A faint whiff of incense, a calm, a dispersal, and the little people have cleaned up after him. The compound silence of the partisans of silence. Many turn aside, for few can breathe here in the absence of words.

  Neferti is careful to hug the shadows, lest someone see a patch of darkness where there is no shadow. Under the arcades there are always shadows, and besides, the market is empty, or almost empty.

  He passes a small café with benches along the side where men sit drinking mint tea and passing around kief pipes . . . laughter behind him.

  He comes now to an open space of rubble and sand, where the merchandise is unloaded. A smell of horses and manure, oxen and leather, the rank reek of camel drivers. He looks up: a scattering of clouds. He will have to cross on cloud shadows.

  Almost through, a path with trees ahead and the sound of water. Then, a sudden shift of wind and he is caught in a spot of blazing sunlight. He hurries on.

  A cry goes up. He has been seen. Four men are rushing toward him, pulling out knives and snatching up stones and lengths of rusty iron. Neferti whips out his revolving blowgun, sput sput sput, spitting out little puffs of death.

  He catches the lead man, a paunchy brute with a round pig face and bristling eyelashes, with a cobra load. The barbed dart thunks an inch into the hard, fat, hairy stomach. The man's mouth flies open. He stumbles and falls to his knees. A pile-up like a football scrimmage. Stonefish dart, the pain like acid through the blood. A man in front of him with an adze . . . henbane and cobra venom right in his open mouth. He tries to raise the adze, his hands like blocks of wood.

  The man hit with the stonefish dart is still screaming. A crowd gathers suddenly, as if they had sprung from the ground, cruising and snapping like aroused sharks. The moment is coming when they will all look at Neferti. He speaks sharply.

  "Can't you see, the man is having a fit. Go fetch the Healer at once!"

  They look back at the screaming man, just long enough for Neferti to slip into the cool shade of a tree.

  6

  Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote

  The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,

  Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages . . .

  There is something exhilarating about the concept of a pilgrimage, stirring dull roots with spring rain, sudden smell of the sea, vast empty lands, at once festive and purposeful, and any such occasion will attract a cruising school of swindlers, steerers, fixers, guides and outright killers for profit.

  The Thuggees, the Deceivers, are in business again, bound together in the brotherhood of murder, waiting for the moment when the glad cry goes up:

  "Beeeetho!" (Outsider)

  Whereupon travelers who have passed themselves off as Accountant, Hippy, Survivalist, Farmer, Artist, Academic, Hard Hat, Pop Group, CIA, KGB, as one man cast off their roles and strangle the Beethos.

  How can one protect his caravan against the Deceivers? Of course you can give them a flutter on the E-Meter, but you don't need that. Self-evident spiritual truth cannot be faked, any more than you can fake a poem, a painting or a good meal, and the lack of truth in fraud is immediately apparent to the eye that can see truth. So why do so many receive the venerable lies of the con man, clearly out to get their money by trickery or violence? Answer is, the mark fears the con man, fears his stronger will, his glittering eye. He listens like a three-year-old child.

  The Swindler has his will.

  I fear thee, Ancient Swindler.

  I fear thy skinny hand.

  Fear not, fear not, convention guest

  This body dropped not down

  It was the fake murder scene with a bladder of pig's blood, where the Swindler pretends to kill his accomplice, who has bungled the deal they were all going to clean up on, into which the mark put his life's savings. Now the mark is an accessory to murder. They spirit him out of town and go on bleeding him.

  "Afraid I have bad news. The relatives are screaming for an autopsy."

  "I thought that was all settled."

  "So did we."

  First they have to pay off a doctor to sign a "natural causes" death certificate. Next thing, the doctor has been indicted for faking death certificates, all his certificates are under investigation. Fortunately, we've been able to shake hands with someone in the record department to pull our file. A surprise witness bobs up, a scrub woman passed out in a broom closet was awakened by the shot. All these people need to be "paid off."

  The mark fears the con man, and he wants desperately to be part of the dangerous, glamorous world of Yellow Kid Weil and the High Ass Kid. This carrot is ruthlessly dangled, and the mark comes back moaning for more. And sometimes the mark comes out ahead.

  "I tell you, Henry, I just can't stand it. He keeps calling me up. 'Any action?' I change my address, he gets a private ass hole to find me. He's even got marks lined up. Good ones, too. I don't want his marks. I don't want his money."

  "Didn't you say once you were looking for the perfect mark?

  Well, it figures, you found what you was looking for. I think your phone is ringing."

  The road to Waghdas, the City of Knowledge, is a long, circuitous detour through labyrinths of ignorance, stupidity and error. Like the Thuggees, the pilgrims, each with a cover story of some trade or profession, pretend not to know each other but present a united front in the face of dangers and emergencies.

  Custom
checks are frequent, and we must find ways of concealing drugs and weapons from a search. The drugs are disguised as food and preserves and ointments, the. weapons as canes and pens, disassembled into seemingly unrelated parts, concealed in shoes and the hems of garments, strapped to our animals. In some cases it is necessary to force animals to swallow pellets of drugs and ammunition, which are subsequently recovered from their dung, or if time is short and we are in need of meat, the animals are killed and slit open.

  The party to which we had attached ourselves numbered several hundred, and a sorrier, seedier bunch of scavengers I have seldom seen. They were all seeking their fortunes, lured by tales of fabulous gold and gems, precious woods and rare herbs that would make them rich so they might live out their lives in sloth and luxury. There was a wide variety of conveyances and pack animals, some of them drawing wagons and buckboards, which were continually getting mired down in the river crossings and swamps on the road.

  The road to the Western Lands is by definition the most dangerous road in the world, for it is a journey beyond Death, beyond the basic God standard of Fear and Danger. It is the most heavily guarded road in the world, for it gives access to the gift that supercedes all other gifts: Immortality.

  Every man starts the course. One in a million finishes. However, biologically speaking, one in a million is very good odds indeed. The Egyptians and the Tibetans made this journey after Death, and their Books of the Dead set forth very precise instructions—as precise as they are arbitrary.

  Who makes the rules? In Waghdas, jumping-off place for the Western Pilgrims, it is considered by most schools extremely disadvantageous to wait for death. If you wait for death, you are subject to death conditions. You are playing against house odds. Failure is almost certain. The best anyone can reasonably hope for is a favorable rebirth.

  "Don't wait, kid. Leave now!"

  "Leave how?"

  Waghdas teems with people who will tell you how. Here is The Pilgrim Market in Waghdas, the City of Knowledge. It stretches as far as the eye can see in all directions. There are underground sections, sections in orbit, vast, intricate structures tower a thousand feet in the air.

  Knowledge takes many forms and contexts. Cloistered ivy-covered halls, serious youths in academic garb . . . the typical is so often not where it's at, deliberately avoided like a cliché, that it becomes in time atypical, and by the inexorable logic of fashion, is once again where it's at.

  Knowledge can be as explosive as Matter into Energy, as deadly as the virus for which the only cure is Death. Knowledge can bind men together in secret brotherhood, the knowledge of some unspeakable deed or rite so foul that an outsider could not conceive of it. So the brothers are safe if they stay together and keep silence.

  The Market is honeycombed with secret societies, and new ones are constantly taking form. Most of them are oriented toward the pilgrimage, and involve a rigorous course of training, which is considered essential for a bare fighting chance of survival . . . training in a wide gamut of weapons and disciplines, meditation, Vipassana, Zen and synthesized disciplines incorporating old teachings with the latest advances in brain and neurological research.

  Other societies prey on the pilgrims, for the area is infected with every variety of faker and swindler selling spurious Western Land plots and villas and condominiums. There you are in your beautiful villa, straight out of Disneyland, on a clear blue lake that drains away, while you sit, with a last derisive gurgle . . . "suuuuuugggger."

  Hustlers, guides, fixers, travel agents cruise the market like sharks. Messiahs on every street corner transfix one with a confront stare:

  "Your life is a ruin."

  "We have the only road to personal immortality."

  Swamis, Rinpoches, practitioners of IS: "That's all there is to it, folks, what is right here, right now in front of you, and once you grasp the IS, you got the WILL BE."

  Uncouth survivalists, bristling with weapons, scent deadly contagion on all sides.

  "God damn perverts and dope fiends."

  "Sex across the state line and injections of Marijuana."

  Communist partisans preach Immortality to the People.

  Don't wait. Leave now. How?

  There are electromagnetic booths that guarantee immediate exteriorization from the body. Be careful: Are you really getting out, or is it one of those fake trips like Mission Impossible where someone thinks he is home in Russia and he is actually in a CIA Ops room?

  A dangerous road. Every pitfall, every error, every snare to which Everyman has been liable since the beginning, you are sure to meet on the road to the Western Lands.

  Waghdas is the most fashioned-minded city, the most factious and the most sensitively attuned to any nuance of change. The fact is that most pilgrims don't even have a clue. So they are constantly cruising around, and any new trend will attract a frantic school of pilgrims, snapping and sniffing for the new thing. Waghdas is swept by fads, like the tornados of Kansas or the hurricanes of Miami.

  A new weapon? Oh, not new at all. Old as Egypt: the flail. But suddenly everybody who is anybody is flail-crazy: flails with live snakes woven in, centipedes and scorpions in thin, glass containers, poisoned porcupine tails, a sea wasp whipped from an aquarium holster.

  "Ah, madame, I have often wondered what jewel I could offer you worthy of your incomparable beauty ... and now, quite suddenly, I know."

  He deftly extracts a tiny blue-ringed octopus from a cigarette-case tank and places it around her horrified neck. The octopus lights up and glows bright blue, a blue that spreads to her face as she weaves in her chair and topples face down in the Baked Alaska.

  Then blowguns take over, and blowpens, like an artist's pencils, in bamboo and thinnest teakwood, ivory and ebony.

  "But it isn't the gun, darling, it's the way you blow it."

  There are magnificent old red-faced English-colonel types can throw one of those fake English coughing fits . . . hurumph . . . coughing out a gaboon-viper dart with every huumph hah hoh. It's like the Masque of the Red Death. The clubroom is littered with stricken agents, bleeding through every pore and orifice. . . .

  Elegant young Oxonian with an ivory blowgun held between thumb and index finger with impeccable elegance as he puffs out a dart . . . shput . . . that simply blows his opponent away as a nothing and a nobody. Uncouth types who belch out the darts like a machine gun . . . Burp Burp Burp! (Ugly frog-faced CIA operative belched out the Parade Bar.) Singing blow artists . . . zinng . . . the dart's out. . . flute blowguns and blunderbuss clarinets . .. and horns that can blast out ten darts to Dead Man Blues. Irish tenors trickle out the darts, snuffboxes and the deadly Sneezers . . . "Choo at you," and he sneezes the dart out like a bullet.

  Many pilgrims hope to simply style their way in by doing the chic thing, the hip thing, the trendy thing, the righteous jumping swinging thing. They dislocate limbs and slip disks in a frantic effort to assume fashionable postures, which constantly change with bewildering speed . . . the bumbling, sloppy, awkward thing is out . . . the tense, purposeful, graceful thing is in . . . the nonchalant, jaunty thing is out . . . the interested, earnest thing is in . . . sex is out, sex is in ... in out. . . right left. You'll never make a style queen, Brad, unless you straighten up, stoop a bit, loosen up, tighten up . . . keep your eye on the ball . . . learn to look away . . . learn to look at . . . stop . . . go . . . the style trap.

  The styles change faster and faster as the Ultimate Arbiter issues directives weekly, daily, hourly. People strip off unsuitable garments in the street, sneering at less agile contenders who have not taken the Alexander course in smooth, quick undressing and re-dressing. Everyone carries toilet kits, in case hair styles should suddenly change, and they are to be seen shaving off untrendy long hair or beards in restaurants, in the streets or in subways, their hairs drifting about and sifting into food like fine herbs. They learn to whip around like boomerangs. You come in leather and get the "sorry, sir" treatment, or you come in a tux and get the s
ame from a leather bar.

  The Arbiter's face is like gray wax, his lips very red, his eyes sparkling with dazzling malice. He is going mad: loincloths to full dress, skinheads, eighteenth-century dandies, togas, djellabas. Everyone now carries huge suitcases about.

  Waghdas, City of Knowledge, is a center for outfitting pilgrims to the Western Lands. Since the dangers are manifold and different for each pilgrim, what equipment and provisions he will need is conjectural. However arcane, recherché, rarified, outré, Alexandrian your requirements, the Waghs can meet them.

  Sharp practice and purveyors of the deadly illusion drugs abound: The Western Bubble gives a vista of lake and valley, vast cities and temples and avenues through which the pilgrim moves without effort, free of his body to roam at will without hunger or fatigue or thirst. All this fades in a few hours, leaving the traveler with his hunger, his thirst, his carnal needs, his awkward, bungling body, abrasive, dreary, dead-end surfaces where everything is exactly what it seems to be. There is no mystery, no magic. Death is as prosaic as the daily paper to flattened minds, a bedpan to a terminal cancer patient. There can be nothing beyond, since there is nothing in front or to the sides in this dead empty place without purpose or meaning. The unfortunate traveler, having poured all his magic into the bubble . . . POP . . . gritty surface with nothing behind ... a smell of burnt plastic and rotten oranges.

  The traveler stops by a concrete wall painted in pyramids of pastel blue and pale pink, a broken box, some lathes, an empty concrete sack. A framework in front of the wall supports a roof of tattered plastic broken into jagged patterns. You can see stick people frozen on the wall, like the shadows of human figures left on the walls of Hiroshima. The shadows don't move. There are windows, used to be a store . . . list of prices on a slab of white wood.