Assassins - Ian Watson & Andy West (9 page)

Arwe slit open the abdomen, laid down the
knife, then with his bare hands tugged yielding flesh wide.
Exerting himself far more than Hakim had believed possible, the old
man proceeded to break ribs and wrench them apart. This laid bare
what Hakim, stepping closer again and bending, could identify as a
livid, bluish heart and lungs that were blotched black. Lower down
the corpse and deep within, he scrutinised what must be a liver,
yet swollen to twice the usual size. Below this, the gall-bladder
leaked thick and fatty black bile. The writhe of pale guts,
ressembling the dissolving arms and legs of tiny infants, knees and
elbows all bent and jumbled together in an obscene stew, bore a
thousand black spots as though being consumed by feasting
beetles.

Arwe took from his bag a container of bamboo
not quite as wide as his wrist, and removed its stopper, a plug of
clay. The bamboo, its top rim sharp, looked greased inside. Then
the old man thrust this device at the victim’s scrotum, twisted to
cut, and captured the soft black oyster of a testicle, for what
private purpose of witchcraft Hakim had no idea.

This done, Arwe seemed utterly exhausted.
Hakim had to practically carry him back to his throne.

And so having seen the unimaginable, they
departed, much to the relief of the rest of the party.

An hour later, a fit of coughing shook the
old man as he was borne along, Hakim pacing alongside. Finally Arwe
spat out a gob of dirty phlegm, and then, breathing hard, he began
to gasp words, as though of a sudden mortality haunted him, and he
wished in Guba’s absence to confide some legacy of wisdom to
Hakim.

Yaqob translated. “Plague. From evil spirit.
Makes home in monkey.”

“Yes?” urged Hakim and Sadiq, almost with one
voice.

“Most spirits in monkeys… benign. Some
sublime. So we worship. Others naughty. Make mischief, small
mischief. A few
very bad
. Often monkey with evil spirit…
weeps, so very sad because made to do evil. Weeps and weeps.”

Hakim reinforced all this in his memory,
hoping soon to make notes, repeating to himself:
plague lives in
monkeys, and those monkeys that harbour it often weep
. What did
this signify? A few months earlier Hakim might have dismissed this
as a fanciful tale. Not now. He was all too aware of Arwe’s depth
of experience and insight.
Merciful Allah, preserve this old
pagan a while more!
Even so, an evil spirit in a monkey…?

At that moment, it was as though a muezzin
wailed from a minaret within his mind:
From Ethiopia the empire
of Axum exported along the Red Sea gold and grain, rhino horns, and
MONKEYS!

‘
Elephant
Walk’, Cambridge, Massachusetts: May

The crisp atmosphere and inspiring light of recent
days had gone, sealed off from New England by a leaden lid of
cloud. Rain streaks chased each other down the windows of Elephant
Walk, distorting the hurrying humanity of Cambridge into ungainly
creatures with poorly applied blotches of colour.

Abigail had arrived early, trying to claim
the military high ground. She removed soaking outer layers and
hoped the restaurant’s warmth would soon evaporate uncomfortable
damp patches from the rest of her clothes. A meaty aroma sharpened
by exotic herbs awoke her hunger. The place was mainly Thai
cuisine, with some Cambodian. Jack came in. The downpour had left
him unscathed, Abigail noted sourly. He was folding up an enormous
golfing umbrella.

He spotted her, coming over and sitting down
without a greeting. “Your nose is wet,” he then observed with a
grin.

Patriarchal crap
, thought Abigail, but
the approach of a waiter prevented her from spitting out a rude
reply.

She ordered something very spicy. Without
even looking at the menu, Jack ordered the same.

“Glad you could make it,” he offered.

“Did I have a choice?”

“I thought you’d relish the opportunity to
instruct on medieval history, and maybe help America too of course.
We’ve always been big buddies with Canada.”

Abigail got the message and gave a
noncommittal grunt. No doubt he had the power to get her thrown out
of the country. She swallowed her pride and bit down on her
resentment at narrow-minded government agencies.

“What do you want to know?” she asked,
managing a business-like if not actually pleasant tone.

Jack’s face crinkled with supercilious
amusement.

“Our language folks tell me that
Alamut
derives from the Arabic for
teaching of the
eagle
.”

“That would figure. An eagle is supposed to
have shown Hasan as-Sabah, the first Master of the Assassins, where
to build his fortress.”

“They also said that the word
assassin
originally meant
those who take hashish
, and these
particular ones specialised in high-risk missions to murder
political and religious leaders. Apparently they took out the
Christian King of Jerusalem in 1192.” Jack leaned forward. All
trace of humour had left him and his blue eyes seemed cold and
accusatory. “Are we facing a bunch of drug-crazed suicide merchants
here?”

Abigail felt her jaw drop. She struggled to
make it work again but words spluttered at her lips.

“Not unless they’re ghosts!” she finally and
indignantly got out.

The food arrived quickly.

“You’re being ridiculous!” hissed Abigail.
“The Mongols…”

“Yeah yeah, I know. The mighty Mongol hordes
wiped out Alamut in 1256. And practically everything else in their
path too, like army ants.”

Jack was relaxed now and his eyes gleamed.
His mouth pulled into a boyish curl. She realised with dismay he’d
been trying to rattle her. It had worked.

“But it wouldn’t be the first time an old
tradition had been resurrected and bent to modern aspirations,” he
casually continued. “What about the Freemasons claiming lineage
from the Templars and borrowing their rituals? Anyhow, if that old
poem of yours
is
a link to all this, your own research has
it as almost a hundred years after Alamut, at least
mid-fourteenth
century.”

As Abigail forked a mouthful of food, her
thoughts racing, warmth invaded her cheeks and neck. Jack’s
stumbling guesses had brought him far too close to territory she’d
only explored herself the other night. Could he tell a guilty flush
from spice-heat?

He couldn’t
possibly
know about
Sinaldin and Guy and their grandfathers and knightly Orders and the
plague, she told herself. Nor did she want him to know, until she’d
sorted out all the connections and implications herself. And there
couldn’t
possibly
be a modern connection. Yet an image of
Trinity church in the Hancock Tower came to mind; hadn’t she
thought herself about old purpose and old words serving new
aims?

Get a grip Abby
. It seemed more than
likely that ICE might be hoping to justify an increased persecution
of Islam, by scaring elected officials with horror stories of
ancient militant sects rising up from the past. She hid her
reaction inside anger, easy enough to do.

“If you have your own
language people
and no doubt
history people
too, why do you need
me
?”
she demanded.

“I like a wide range of sources,” mumbled
Jack through a full mouth. “They rarely agree, hence the cracks
through which an investigation might proceed are quickly revealed.”
He swallowed, then gasped and reached for water. “Hey, this is
hot
. Besides, to be frank, my people lack imagination.”

Abigail couldn’t resist. “Hell, you more than
make up for them. You’ve got
far
too much. Or maybe it’s
just paranoia,” she added tartly.

Jack glared over the edge of his glass as his
Adam’s apple bobbed. Abigail lightened her tone and spoke hurriedly
on.

“Well here’s one small crack for you. The
word
assassin
probably doesn’t come from
hashashin
,
the literal Arabic for
those who eat hashish
.
Hashashin
was used as a general term for disreputable
people. I guess it was bad to take drugs even then. That survived
into modern times as the Egyptian
hashasheen
, meaning
riotous or rowdy. I guess the Nizaris’ enemies might have used it
in that sense. But the sect itself considered they were the
guardians of knowledge
, or perhaps more accurately
guardians of secrets
. The Arabic
assasseen
means
‘guardian’. A much closer match, don’t you think?”

“You see you’re damn useful already! Did the
concept of assassins and assassination not exist before this cult,
then? Leaving aside bumping off Julius Caesar and such.”

“Oh yes. Another earlier Shi’a group were
called
the stranglers
, for instance. But the Nizari sect was
simply the most systematic and dedicated at exercising this um…
method of control. You might say they laid the ground-rules for the
assassination industry, and their name became the label for that
industry. It crept into European use via Italy’s contacts with the
Levant. The first well-known association of a wicked killer with
the word
assassin
is in Dante’s
The Divine
Comedy
.”

“Wow. Diabolical operators.” Jack was
sweating and his cheeks were flushed. He was clearly finding the
Gaeng Ped out of his culinary league. Uncharitable but satisfying
amusement leaked over Abigail’s thoughts.

“No worse than many at the time and more
since. In the grand competition of history, you might regard the
Nizaris as a targeted instrument of surgical precision. By
comparison the so-called Holy Inquisition was a blunt tool for
torture and extermination used indiscriminately.”

Abigail flashed what she hoped was a superior
smile. She’d used this example purely to attack Jack’s prejudice
and remind him that Christianity too had nasty skeletons in the
cupboard. She was beginning to enjoy herself, though faintly heard
instinct told her this was dangerous.

Jack sucked in more water and pulled out a
handkerchief to dab at his neck.

“You called them Nizaris,” he wheezed.
Clearing his throat, he carried on in more normal tones, though his
voice still scraped. “So what precisely does that mean and what
secrets were they guarding? And what drove them? What especially
drove them to carry out political killings?”

Cooled by damp clothes and well used to Thai
spices, Abigail finished a mouthful and gazed at him with perfect
composure. Well, she acknowledged, he earned a mark for
attentiveness at least.

“You know about the Sunni and Shi’a branches
of Islam, I take it?”

“Sure. Been tearing each other apart in Iraq
for years.”

“The Shi’a only amount to about ten percent
of all Muslims.” Jack’s eyes registered mild surprise, but he
wasn’t going to admit this and remained silent. “Yet they are
themselves split into several divisions,” continued Abigail. “These
arose from schisms over the succession of the Imamate.” She paused,
wondering how to compress centuries of religious diversification
into just a few sentences.

“I’m all ears,” prompted Jack.

“Okay, well there were just twelve lineal
Imams after the Prophet Muhammad, the Messenger of God. Twelve
divinely inspired guides, descended in the line of the Prophet’s
blood. The first was Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali. The second and
third were Ali’s sons by the Prophet’s daughter, Fatimah. Most
Shi’ites acknowledge all twelve, and also believe the twelfth will
return one day – he went into hiding you see, but over a thousand
years ago.”

“Heck, that’s a great act of faith.”

“Isn’t all religion just an act of blind
faith?”

“Acceptance of God is
a certainty,
nothing blind about it! Uh… sorry, carry on.”

Abigail briefly wondered whether she’d
touched a nerve.

“Anyhow, the bulk of the Shi’ites are called
Twelvers for their belief in the full line. A smaller group think
this line went wrong after the sixth Imam. They believe the Imamate
should have passed through Ismail, the sixth Imam’s eldest son, who
in fact died before his father but had eligible offspring.

“These dissenters are known as Ismailis or
Seveners, since they dispute the seventh Imam and the line
thereafter. And because of an earlier dispute over two brothers,
another schismatic group are known as Fivers. Are you keeping
up?”

Jack was frowning.

“Yeah, but get to the Nizaris, and don’t make
it so dry.”

Abigail shrugged. “You wanted a history
lesson… Well, the Twelvers and the Seveners both spawned several
sub-groups over the years. The Seveners peaked in the Middle Ages
when the Fatimids, an Ismaili dynasty, conquered Egypt and ruled it
for about two hundred years. Half-way through, around the end of
the tenth century, schism struck again.

“At that date leadership of all the Ismailis
went along with the Fatimid throne. Nizar, the rightful heir, was
pushed aside by his younger brother and put to death. That was just
the excuse Ismailis in Syria and Palestine needed to break away
from Egyptian Fatimid control. Their rather inspired leader, Hasan
as-Sabah, he of the
eagle’s nest
, claimed that Nizar was
merely ‘hidden’. Hasan set himself up as the only ‘gate’ to Nizar,
whom his people still followed; hence of course
Nizaris
.
Hasan created a power-base among mountain tribes, and propagated a
mystical form of Ismaili doctrine that became increasingly divorced
from practically any mainstream ideas. Said doctrine was backed by
fortresses and tactical acts of political murder. The sect of the
Assassins was born. Later Ismailis rewrote history to make Hasan
himself
an Imam, which for their sect means
the
Imam,
since there can only be one at a time in direct descent.”