Where was that girl?
While he waited, Mochamet al Rotshild thought about many things. He had lived, and for the most part enjoyed, a long, eventful life which had left him many things to think about. One of these was the Caliph he now served, His Holiness Abu Bakr Mohammed VII.
A canny, pragmatic ruler following the legendary tradition of Haroun al Raschid, Abu Bakr Mohammed had made it his custom to surround himself whenever possible with an unusual mixture of counselors and administrators, assuring himself that they came from every conceivable walk of life within his vast, varied domain. This made certain security risks inevitable; still, upon occasion it produced an individual such as Mochamet al Rotshild, whom the Caliph insisted upon calling Commodore.
“I was the unlooked-for consequence of an unsanctified union,” the merchant had explained to the Caliph, when they had first met many years before, “between one of your Saracen noblemen and a lady of Judaic heritage—and what her kin considered easy virtue.”
Within himself, Mochamet al Rotshild smiled over memories of that first meeting. The Caliph had journeyed to Marseilles, among other reasons to confer an honor upon a rising merchant prince. Each had come away with what he had reason to believe was a new friend. Concerning his past, the “Commodore” had found himself being uncharacteristically open with Abu Bakr Mohammed.
A young Mochamet al Rotshild might have been doomed, even in this enlightened world of Judaeo-Saracen Europe, to a lowly status, menial labor, a lifetime of social invisibility. His mother, abandoned by her lover, cast out onto frozen street-cobbles by her penurious and puritanical family, had expired—he believed of nothing more than despair—just six years after he had been born.
At an early age, however, he had stumbled into a profession in which he could make a mark through brave intelligence, solely by his own efforts, independent of whatever fate polite convention might otherwise have decreed for him. Having fallen prey to a press-gang, he had shipped out from his native Iskutlan (“I myself have seen that mighty, mysterious serpent of Loch al Ness,” he had lied to the Caliph decades later), from Glasgow, down the Firth al Claid, as a common seaman.
It had been an age of discovery, not only for the boy but for his entire civilization. He himself had witnessed many strange and wonderful sights, trading with white barbarians, presumed to be the final remnant of the ancient Christians, upon the eastern shore of the Savage Continent, with the mighty and decadent Incas in the south, even with hostile and suspicious Mughals in ports from Sakhalin to the Red Sea. Growing up, he had supplemented what he saw with book-wisdom, aspiring to everything a human being could learn of the universe he lived in.
Cabin-boy to deckhand, deckhand to mate, Mochamet al Rotshild climbed the endless ladder, at long last a master, then owner of his own vessel. Sails it had been in those days, canvas, line, great rotary wings turning side-paddles bigger than houses, taking him to worlds beyond imagination. Now all of his numerous fleet were run by steam—he had been first in his business to convert—as were railroads everywhere, crisscrossing Europe and Africa.
There was occasional talk of slaveless sedan chairs.
The merchant sighed. Not in his time, he found himself half hoping—then, in an abrupt reversal, chiding himself for that same conservatism which kept his competitors from catching up with him. Slaveless sedans run by steam, indeed! A fortune there, just waiting to be made! Not only would he be the first in Islam to purchase one, but, when he found time—perhaps after this current political unpleasantness was over with—he would see about hastening their invention!
Make a note of it!
Thus it was scarcely fear of the unknown but a familiar expectation which caused Mochamet al Rotshild now to grasp his concealed weapon with his left hand while pretending to drink with his right. He knew this sort of establishment very well. That it was buried deep within a landlocked city, was a gathering-place for draymen, day-laborers, off-duty palace drudges, rather than barefooted sailors, reeking of creosote and coal-smoke, made little difference. He was aware of probabilities, not only of having been followed here but of being accosted by a simple robber. For this rendezvous, he had borrowed the oldest, most disreputable clothing of his oldest, most disreputable servant. He had put aside his jewelry. A worn and dirty burnoose concealed the flaming red hair which, even at his age, remained something of a trademark with him.
Was that confounded woman ever going to show up?
There was a lull as the musicians laid ouds and concertinas they had been torturing aside, seeking whatever respite they were accustomed to. Dancing-women (he could hardly call them girls) circulated among their custom, selling drinks along with cynical promises. Mochamet al Rotshild poured his own drink upon the floor beneath his table, then bought a second from a half-naked harridan who could have been his mother—or at least his sister—and looked around him.
Charles Martel they called this basement, in reference to an inscription graven over the nearby entrance of a grander building which, centuries before, had become the Caliph’s palace. It had not been built by the Faithful. Charles Martel, the inscription demanded in flowing cursive, where are you now?
Protected from that very Mortality originally ordained to the wholesale destruction of their Faith—it was their conscientious practice of ritual sanitation which had afforded their salvation—dark-complected strangers with curve-bladed swords had, once upon a time, and on their way to greater conquest, marched into a deserted, undefended Tours with that sardonic question upon their lips.
They had received no answer.
Their ancient enemy was gone forever.
The Old World did not long lie empty, although the merchant gathered from the histories he had read that a greatly increased barrenness, as compared to earlier times, had been one consequence of the Death his ancestors had not entirely escaped. Population everywhere was small and very slow-growing, yet it made a certain prosperity possible for those who had survived and been fruitful.
Today, not one citizen of Rome in five thousand could tell you who Charles Martel had been. Laa thaghthaam, it mattered but little. His had become name to an illegal drinkery where low-status palace servants came daily to break the laws of God and man. Mochamet al Rotshild had been required to give a password (“Open Sesame”) to some low-browed thug behind a slitted window before being allowed to descend into this temporary Gehenna. Unlike some of his predecessors, the Caliph left it alone, certain its eradication would spawn worse places, better hidden.
If the former were possible.
The sweet-sour odors of thanpaah and ghashish drifted toward him upon stale, ouiskeh-tainted air. Mochamet al Rotshild, bastard son of poor-but-proud Iskutish Jewry and a slumming Moslem aristocrat, had in his youth avoided such deadfalls for the destitute hopeless. He pulled his cloak about him, wrinkling his nose.
“Charjooh, Siti, nabhwan thismaghly...?”
There came a soft, female voice behind him. He must be getting very old not to have sensed her approaching. He turned to see a close-veiled face, that of a woman, too well dressed to be safe in this establishment. A dram of the perfume she wore, pilfered no doubt from her mistress, might have bought this entire place.
“Sit down, girl!” he growled, “I am not your Lord—I am a ‘sir,’ if that makes you feel more comfortable. How do I know that you are who you are supposed to be?”
“Artichoke,” the woman asserted, as if this reply she gave made perfect sense. It did, the merchant thought, indeed. More passwords, this one not quite so foolish as it sounded, grimly appropriate, a much-better-kept secret than “Open Sesame.”
“Very well, Marya,” Mochamet al Rotshild answered. “Wait till the music starts again—if you wish to dignify it by that name—then tell me of the Princess’ most recent nightmare.”
2
Later, when the old man had wasted yet another ouiskeh upon a patch of crumbling, filth-encrusted brick, he was even less satisfied than he had been before.
The
girl Marya was less wasteful. Lifting her veil modestly at immodest intervals, she gulped her vile portion, as if this could somehow protect her from the potential consequences of being caught at spying upon the Caliph’s family.
Or at least from contemplating them.
Mochamet al Rotshild muttered, disappointment in his tone, “I have never heard of those particular thorn shrubs growing in the Island Continent. It was not a prophetic dream at all.”
“Yet,” offered an alcohol-emboldened Marya, “the Holy Koran teaches—”
“I know what the Koran teaches, child!” He looked at her empty cup, a sneer ill-concealed behind his beard. “Better than you, to appearances. Yet that strange flying machine...those weapons. Firing fifteen or twenty cartridges without reloading? It may be prophecy after all, of a time far in future, when—”
“She often sees machines that fly, fan-bladed hoverers, slant-winged shiny screamers, bright-plumed little buzzers, disk-shaped glowing warblers—a veritable aviary of them. What of it? If flying machines could be made, they’d all look alike, wouldn’t they?”
He gave his head to a reluctant nodding which grew more vigorous with each cycle. “You are right, woman! I will not succumb to superstition! There was a chance, that is all, a chance, that something of interest to my principals might be happening with our Princess, perhaps a chance to test it, with war flaring southward. But it has come to nothing, as was to be rationally anticipated.”
He reached into his cloak, extracting a gold coin.
“There—go back to the palace. Keep your eyes and ears open. Let this be a lesson: there is much to learn, but just one way to learn it. The difficult, mundane way.”
The treacherous girl was gone before he had poured his last drink out upon the floor. Climbing the stone steps, passing through the guarded, slitted door himself, he wondered for a moment to whom she would report this conversation for a coin of gold.
Palace intrigue: always the weak of mind and spirit gathered around power, attempting to jog the elbow of anyone who held it in hopes of catching a little of it when it spilled. It was inevitably the tiniest dribblings of power which produced the greatest betrayals. He himself, Mochamet al Rotshild, well-known adviser to the Caliph, pirate, merchant prince, and spy, ought to know!
As did a cloaked and veiled figure which detached itself from the criminal shadows, following him up the stairs and away from the Charles Martel.
XIII: The Artichoke
“Your Lord knows you very well; if He will, He will have mercy on you, or, if He will, He will chastise you.”—The Koran, Sura XVII
Time passed, thought Rabbi David Shulieman, and with its passage, each man’s youthful hopes (yes, and his accumulated fears as well), leaving nothing in its turbid wake but dispassionate, useless knowledge—and aching emptiness.
This morning’s lesson with Ayesha had not gone well at all. He had not been himself. She had been gracious, quite understanding and forgiving, but he had felt too distant, too abstracted to concentrate, focused upon one particular moment in the past they shared.
Eight years had gone by in a twinkling, while war with the Mughal Empire had somehow swollen from what had been at best a moment of stirring adventure, enjoyed vicariously by all, at worst an equally to be borne annoyance—shortages, rationing, disrupted personal plans—into something gray and terrible which had come to dominate the days, the nights, the entire lives of everyone within Islam’s embrace.
Men in the tens of thousands had been called to duty. Europe was becoming a continent of women’s villages. Taxes had become unbearable, burdening, as all taxation must, whatever the intention or the mandate, those who could afford them least. Vaster, more potent battle fleets were launched southward. Sometimes they even returned. Link-treaded steam-chuffing titans roamed the lifeless central deserts of the Island Continent—an invention which, at another time, might have filled him with enthusiasm for the future—sinfully wasting any genius which had created them by hurling shells at one another.
Saracen surgeons were becoming most adept at pulling shards of steel and bronze and lead from the writhing, shrieking, blood and excrement-smeared bodies of male children old enough to wear a uniform and carry guns. For that reason, if for no other, the cultivation of poppies was becoming quite as important a war-industry as the mass production of explosive projectiles. Win or lose the war, they would not soon see an end to what this sort of agriculture portended.
The scholar shook his head.
He sat, now, upon the selfsame balustrade where, the best part of a weary decade ago, he had first received news of the war from the lips of the Caliph himself. Below, Islam’s Eternal City was fog-enshrouded. Invisible. Reflecting his mood, the sky was mournful today, a light fall of chilly moisture keeping the stone flagging slippery, muffling city noises, forcing the very birds into hiding. It made his spectacles opaque, then stream with condensation. Inside the palace, it would be warm and dry, approaching time for the midday meal. Shulieman, however, would not go inside. He drew his thin cloak about himself, listened to his stomach grumble, and continued thinking gloomy thoughts.
Had it been nighttime, the city below would have been invisible in any case, strict martial orders to snuff out street and window lighting having been issued. Thus, from the near-miracle of his boyhood, citywide gas lighting, civilization had returned once again to the dimness and danger of candles and oil-lamps. Not that the capital of Islam was in peril—from Mughal artillery, sabotaged gas lines, or from anything else—but it must be seen by all the Faithful to share inconvenience with other of the Caliph’s cities which were.
Like ancient Romans before them, Saracens regarded the Mediterranean as “our sea,” fortified, impassable at Gebr al Tarik, likewise sealed at the Bosporus. The long, mountainous border shared with Mughals eastward was quiet. This, after all, was not a war for land—such a war had not been fought since the Mortality—but, in a sense, for the heart and mind of God. The Lesser Ocean had not seen much fighting—the Mughals’ lines of supply were too long to mount much of an effort there, their ships inferior to those of the Caliph.
If one could believe reports these days.
Thus the bitterest conflict centered upon the Island Continent, as if it had been chosen arbitrarily as a neutral battleground, a vacant lot selected by two brawling schoolboys. If there were already a people there, primitive but wise, who knew—who cared—nothing for the dispute of foreign invaders which reshaped them into injured innocents, well, they were not of the Faithful, were they?
Of anybody’s Faithful?
Feeling damp, he shivered. Not enough sense to go in out of the rain. Perhaps this was the essence of all human folly, he thought. Mankind lacked sense to go in out of the rain, be it a harmless urban drizzle or a torrent of lethal machinery hurled by an anonymous enemy who suffered an identical shortcoming.
Unbidden, almost unwelcome in his present mood, came a more comforting thought that these eight joyless years had produced one thing of uncompromised preciousness. The Princess Ayesha had grown into young womanhood, even-tempered, graceful-limbed, beautiful by any standard of any time or any civilization.
Thanks to himself, to other of her teachers—no less than to her own innate intelligence—she had come to grasp each of the sciences, theology, and mathematics. August visitors to the Roman court, even resident artists, philosophers, rabbis, holy men, were upon frequent occasion dumbfounded by the girl’s astute observations—offered gravely, in the beginning with a childish lisp. Most were not aware that her sleeping hours were punctuated by nightmares. Her screaming, however, still awakened the entire palace at times. Awake, she chorded her oud, handled animals and servants well. If her nightmares had endowed her with any talent for soothsaying, however, it was an erratic, useless one.
He ought to know.
For some time, now, he had been keeping a compendium of his young charge’s dreams, in an attempt to sort them out, make some sense of them. In her visions, she often gl
impsed people of extinct races, in alien array, many curious beasts, impossible machines, fantastic cities that could never have existed.
Only last week, for example, “she”—from the viewpoint of her dream—had been chauffeured about in a wheelless vehicle, one of a myriad skimming grass-covered big-city thoroughfares at ridiculous velocities—guided by a shaggy, manlike animal of some variety in colorful attire.
Sometimes she dreamed of horses.
In a more recent dream, she had been married to a humble scholar, much like himself—bury that thought deep, old friend!—suffering with his fellow citizens through a widespread economic dislocation, who was nevertheless gifted by some patron with a double-breeched pistol, its barrels fashioned of glass, muzzles molded together into the shape of a roaring lion’s head.
This odd weapon she had seen in much detail, even to twisted rifling in its pentagon-sectioned bores. That she could retain her dreams with such vivid clarity was thanks, in the main, to efficacious medicines compounded for her by her father’s physicians from, if one could credit it, dried hearts of the common artichoke.
Scientific efforts to determine what it was in artichokes that did the work had been interrupted by the war—so much for any thesis that war is good for progress—but the same medicine was being given now to soldiers who had survived the conflict southward, but whose experiences had left them shambling mental wrecks.
It seemed to help.
There was a certain aptness here. Thus far, Shulieman had found no pattern to Ayesha’s dreams which made sense of them. Upon occasion, she predicted future events with startling accuracy. Yet her strongest-felt premonitions in most instances proved groundless. It was as if she possessed a private peephole upon what-might-be, as if the universe itself resembled that artichoke of which her medicine was compounded, the real world in which she spent her waking hours one slender threadlike leaf, deep inside its very heart, surrounded by near-identical leaves which grew larger, coarser, more different from the original as they grew further from the familiar core, until, at its outer circumference, they were unrecognizable distortions of what had been begun with.