Assassins - Ian Watson & Andy West (22 page)

Hakim’s own rise must ultimately lead to the
eagle’s nest of Alamut in Persia. That could be a year away or
more, yet surely Allah desired to pull him up! He restarted his
climb to qa’lat al-Kahf, though his legs ached much more than he
remembered when he was a boy herding goats.

Qazvin, Iran:
May

Abigail breezed along the streets of Qazvin in a haze
of sunlight and traffic fumes and euphoria. She was free! Free of
Terry, free of Jack’s arrogant intrusions, out of her father’s
range too. Even Walid’s sudden death now seemed distant, unreal.
The Eagle’s Nest was tantalisingly close, perched in the mountains
beyond the town.

The pieces of the medieval puzzle churned at
the back of her mind while a powerful potion made her feet light
and her thoughts soar, as well as painting a silly grin across her
features. Ignoring a warning voice that bleated
this is too
soon
, Abigail was seriously contemplating romance. She savoured
the name, Kamal al-Mustafa Abu al-Bashir. How exotic!

They’d come here to Iran via Cairo, where
Kamal had some business to attend to. But in six days there he’d
only been absent for two mornings and one evening. The rest of the
time he’d swept her through a kaleidoscopic tour: colourful
bazaars, the majestic Nile, fancy restaurants offering the best of
local cuisine, Cairo’s medieval walls, and of course museums. Not
to mention an obligatory visit by taxi to the pyramids, including a
short amble on the backs of two snooty camels led by raggy young
boys. Abigail had giggled during that ride, and when Kamal called
out to her, “What is amusing you?” she’d exclaimed, “Kamal’s camel!
I’m on it!”

All the time, like the support of a magic
carpet, was Kamal’s courtesy and gleaming smile, his self-assurance
in any circumstance and his seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of
Islamic history. Abigail felt a little unworldly beside him, most
unusual for her! She’d tried out her own humble smattering of
Arabic with only patchy success, although Kamal graciously
pronounced himself impressed by her effort.

And too, thought Abigail as colour came to
her cheeks, there was Kamal’s maleness. For a businessman turned
academic he had a trim figure with hard muscle. His manner was
unapologetically firm with pushy stall-tenders or lax waiters. His
clean yet musky scents pulled at her. Behind intelligent eyes
something powerful and animal lurked, something she might want to
see unleashed upon herself!

Excitement coursed through Abigail. Yet Kamal
remained the perfect gentleman. So much so, she’d worried he wasn’t
interested in her! It was then of course, that she realised she was
very much
interested in him.

Now, just this morning, as he’d dropped her
off in the center of Qazvin, she’d pecked him on the cheek, quite
without thought as it happened, but an answering warm touch on her
arm and a sparkle in his eyes stilled her worries. He
was
interested, but traditional; she needed to give him permission,
perhaps assure him that the age-gap didn’t bother her.

With difficulty, she forced her thoughts back
down to earth. Noisy traffic threaded through a jumble of
architecture ancient and modern. A low concrete barrier topped by
steel railings bounded a park. The concrete crawled with Arabic
graffiti in cherry red and green, too stylised for Abigail to pick
out words. Inside the park young couples strolled or sat on the
grass, some holding hands. The women’s headscarves were almost off
their heads. It seemed that the conservatives didn’t have
everything their own way. One couple kissed, and Abigail found her
silly grin reasserting itself. She tried to banish it by taking a
swig of water, then checked that her own headscarf was firmly in
place.

Only a minute or two later, Abigail located
the small museum at the edge of the park, which Kamal recommended
the day before. “Rather a hole in the wall kind of place,” he had
said, frowning as he wondered whether he’d picked the right figure
of speech, “but worth a look.”

There were indeed just three small and
somewhat shabby rooms, none with windows. Artefacts from right
across Qazvin’s long history were displayed in dimly lit cabinets:
part of a gilded chariot wheel from the city’s glory days as
capital of the ancient Persian empire, a rusted Mongol sword, fine
plates from the Saffavid era, a highly decorated musket.

Disconcertingly the young female assistant,
who seemed to have sole charge, followed Abigail to each exhibit.
She was slight and wore a full burkha in black, only her brown eyes
visible to Abigail. Wide and unfocussed, those eyes roved
restlessly from side to side. Having determined that her only
visitor of the moment spoke English, the girl occasionally offered
hushed comments that seemed speculative at best.

“This musket, gift from famous Sultan, never
fired,” came a whisper through the dark cloth where a mouth should
be. “It is said… who fires it first… will die
himself
!”

In the third room, Abigail came across a
scale-model of Alamut. Or at least a model of what people decades
ago thought Alamut
might
have looked like; the battlements
were covered in dust and paint was peeling from the sheer walls.
Only a trace of green remained in the fake grass at the foot of the
model’s mountain slopes. A faded wall-panel gave a brief history of
the Nizaris in several languages.

“
Evil
men,” hissed the assistant.
“Unholy. Their assassins… they could pass unseen through locked
doors. Their masters made dangerous poisons… no I mean, hmm,
potions
. Gaining power over disease… perhaps even power over
death. Holding many… hmm, spellbound… many who would harm them
otherwise.”

Abigail smiled, revising the girl’s age
downwards in her mind. Though her English was pretty good. “Surely
that’s just myth. Shouldn’t a museum stick to the facts?” she
chided gently.

The girl’s eyes rolled.

“Allah
used
the Mongols to… hmm,
erase
these bad men. The only force on Earth strong enough!
Nizaris were heretics. Yet they held
a power
. Their power
was a fact.”

The girl was clearly dotty, not to mention in
the wrong job. She’d probably do well on the stage, though she’d
need to shed that burkha.

On a shelf by the model were a couple of
cracked terracotta storage jars and a line of small bottles,
apparently uncovered quite recently at Alamut.

“May I touch?” asked Abigail. But the strange
young assistant had slipped away, perhaps back to her post near the
door.

Abigail picked up one of the bottles. The
glass was thick, with a faint tinge of green. Around the neck were
patches of some black substance. She couldn’t be sure, but it
looked like hardened black wax, perhaps the remains of a seal
around the stopper.
What would they want to store so
meticulously?

An intense “Take care!” followed her out from
the lair of the young woman who tended ancient artefacts, as
Abigail emerged into dazzling sun and honking horns.

Along the road she visited a small store to
grab some chocolate before continuing on her way. Abigail always
felt guilty consuming a whole bar, no matter how hard she tried not
to be. This didn’t stop her eating it, yet she certainly wouldn’t
be telling Kamal about the habit. Neither had she mentioned her
constant email contact with Paul Summers, or indeed anything more
about the journalist. An undercurrent of guilt niggled her for this
too, though some instinct kept her silent.
Kamal is so formal,
so manly,
she reasoned with herself;
he might get
jealous
. It’d certainly be hard to disguise the fact that poor
Paul clearly mooned after her.

She smiled again, this time smugly. With half
a bar already working its magic and the ecstasy of another half to
go, she considered it absolutely essential for a woman to have a
queue of male interest.

She consulted her crumpled tourist map for
the next target, a historic area where books and prints and
antiques were sold, at greatly inflated prices according to Kamal.
She went by way of the famous Imamzadeh Hossein, a mausoleum, a
divine work of 16
^th
century architecture, added to in
the 19
^th
century. Yet it wasn’t the building that moved
Abigail, but the multitude of memorials to martyrs from the
Iran-Iraq war arranged in neat rows beside it. Set into the
headstone of each was a faded photograph; a whole harvest of young
male faces reaped by the ambition of Saddam Hussein and the
pussy-footing of the West.

As she proceeded down the funerary aisles in
horrid fascination, Walid came to mind, sweeping away the last of
her buoyant mood and bringing a flood of tears. Then she recalled
what he’d said about the Islamic Resurrection. Would the bodies of
all these martyred men one day rise in ghostly ranks? All leeched
of colour by time, as the merciless Middle-Eastern sun was slowly
erasing the hues and definition from their captured images too.
Rise to rejoin their souls, up past the gleaming blue tile-work of
the great dome, its apex pointing to heaven?

Abigail banished her imaginings, drying her
eyes with a tissue and taking another swig of water. Unfortunately,
the chocolate was all gone. She doubted the Islamic Resurrection as
much as the Christian one, but more importantly for her right now
it didn’t seem to provide a plausible context for the words
death swells and overflows
that Safiyya had written. The
highly modified Nizari concept of Resurrection was even less likely
to supply an explanation.

A connection with plague did seem strong but
was wholly circumstantial. Even if Safiyya
had
woven in the
big event of her time, she would surely have remained within
traditional forms. So what core Nizari symbolism had
death
swelling and overflowing
, and what special vision to judge did
the
teacher of many lessons
, the Imam, have within this
context?

The words of the fragment had stumped Kamal
as much as they had Walid. His interest in her medieval mystery had
been intense since they’d reached Cairo, perhaps the irresistible
pull of an academic challenge, as with herself. Nevertheless, she’d
fed him only fractions of her knowledge so far, just one drop of
intellectual nectar at a time. She wasn’t sure why.
Oh come off
it girl, you’re teasing him on!
Maybe she did need all her
womanly wiles to capture a prize like Kamal but, soon enough, she
thought as a warm feeling rushed up inside her, the busy bee that
was Kamal might have sweeter nectar to sip at.

A while later, in a market street, small
doors became entrances to enticing caves filled with brass and
silver and polished wood, gilded manuscripts and antique prints.
People drifted idly. Vendors tried to snare her with their calls.
Vehicles nosed their way through, their tyres just inches from the
goods heaped up to right and left. Old books were on offer in a
minority of the many tiny establishments.

An hour later, Abigail had just one prize to
show for an intensive search; according to the vendor’s broken
English a volume of early medieval love poetry from across the
Islamic world, itself published in Arabic in the 1890s, a more
innocent time perhaps. She thought it would be fun for Kamal to
translate some of the verses for her. Despite this minor triumph,
real prizes eluded her. It wasn’t easy searching for works in
languages one scarcely knew. She’d found just three books on the
Ismailis, one of them in English, another with dramatic
illustrations suggesting it was as much a novel as a history. All
seemed standard fare.

Yet fate threw her a final chance. The last
shop on the street, at the shabbier end, was entirely a bookshop.
Oddly relieved, it dawned on her how she was determined to show
Kamal that she could pursue her goals independently, even out here.
If there was going to be romance, she preferred to start from a
position of relative equality!

Tatty books and papers crammed the long
corridor of the shop’s dim space. The straining shelves supporting
walls of literature were untreated wood polished by long use. At
the far end, an old man with a flowing grey beard sat at an antique
desk. He nodded to Abigail, though said nothing. The thick black
rims of his glasses seemed too heavy for his emaciated face and
pinched nose to support. Behind him, red and gold and green spines
of the more valuable volumes gleamed.

Abigail always felt at home surrounded by
words, but these were still very foreign to her; she could make
little headway on the large and confusing tapestry of titles. She
pulled out a few works and checked for illustrations and style,
after some minutes managing to identify the poetry and history
sections.

The old man’s black slippers appeared before
Abigail as she gazed at the volumes nearest to the floor, and she
looked up. His sharp frame jutted through a thin robe of pale
blue.

“
Puis-je
vous aider, Madame?”
His heavily accented voice was hoarse
and very quiet, a rustle of desiccated stalks on an early autumn
breeze.

French was a good guess, thought Abigail, or
maybe he just didn’t speak any English. Headscarf notwithstanding,
she must look very obviously a Westerner. Abigail explained her
quest for Ismaili poetry and religious texts. She didn’t know how
much he understood.

“Vous cherchez les perles, les choses
ésotériques.
Mais ces gens
laissaient seulement des vieilles pierres et mythes
indistincts.
Ils partirent il y a beaucoup de siècles.”

She was looking for pearls, esoteric pearls.
But those guys only left old stones and vague myths behind. They
left centuries ago…

Then he hunkered awkwardly down and indicated
one slim volume, before padding silently back to his desk. A
collection of poetry. Not just old stones and shadowy myths; they
left behind poetry too. She recalled her last ever talk with Walid
and his quote from Nasir-i-Khusraw; she’d read much Khusraw since,
in translation. The old cleric’s chocolate voice echoed in her
thoughts…
the esoteric is like pearls
. What pearl was she
seeking precisely?