Seven Veils of Seth (23 page)

“Which do you prefer: a man who kills you from love or one who saves your life out of hatred?”

“I can't begin to answer this riddle.”

He bowed to invite his visitor to be seated. They sat down, facing each other. The jenny master said, “How could the question not be a riddle when everything in this desert is a riddle? Our life is a riddle. Our death is a riddle. Our passage through this world of ours is a riddle.”

His companion groaned with pain. After a silence, he said, “The fact is that I would not have set aside my self-esteem to come to you after we parted had the riddle you mentioned not generated another one.”

The strategist opted for silence and so the visitor completed his statement: “I merely want you to confess to the assembly that you are able to shape-shift.”

“Shape-shift?”

His companion said nothing, and so the strategist asked, “What good would my admission that I can shape-shift do?”

Ewar replied with sudden zeal, “It will help. If you admit that, the penalty will be altered to banishment.”

“Banishment?”

“Exile. He will spend the rest of his days as a rootless wanderer; just the way you've always wanted him to live.”

“Can a man become a wayfarer after the time has passed?”

“I don't understand.”

The strategist was still. After a silence, he said, “But how can the punishment be changed when the result of the crime is the same?”

“The elders think this will lighten the punishment considerably.”

“Do you mean to say that your Law makes a distinction between killing a woman and killing a man?”

“Certainly not.”

“Or that it distinguishes between a stranger and a resident?”

“Certainly not.”

Ewar fell silent. After a pause, he said, “There's another secret to the matter that I'll share with you if you tell me the secret of metamorphosis.”

“Ha, ha . . . is this a deal?”

“Everything in our world is a deal.”

“How can you ask me to confess to something that I haven't done?”

“You're not going to disappoint me?”

They exchanged a look, and their eyes glowed in the generous light of the stars. Each man discerned a prophecy in his companion's eyes. Ewar said: “I'm going to tell you a story.”

Since his companion did not comment, the chief continued, “Many years ago, when the desert was smothered by grass and by tribes, there lived two close friends who could not bear to live far apart, even though they clashed whenever they were together. Their love for each other was so intense that whenever one fell in love with a woman, his buddy did too. Once, one of them married a beauty from a neighboring tribe and they had a child, who was all the man possessed in the whole world. During the first quarrel that erupted between them, however, the woman confessed to him that his friend had fathered the child. He thought this was a lie she had concocted to sear his heart, since women are capable of transforming a lie into the truth and the truth into a lie, but she reminded him of the snake that he had once found coiled around her body and that had then dispersed like a mirage. She said that this apparition had been a snake only to his eyes. In point of fact, it had been his disputatious colleague, from whose loins she had conceived the child. On seeing the suffering in his eyes, she told him that she had acted in this way for his own good, because a sorceress had informed her that he belonged to that group of men fated never to beget a child for the desert. Do you know what that she-jinni did the day her spouse reproached her for her conduct during the first argument after this admission?”

He raised his head to the stars and let out a moan of distress. With his look still fixed on that void strewn with stars, he said, “She took the child to the pasture and left him in a herd belonging to a neighboring tribe. When he questioned her, she told him she had done that to sear his heart, for she was a person who could have children for the desert, whereas he never could.”

He fell silent, but his eyes clung to the celestial sphere. Afterwards he asked in an emotionless voice, “Do you know who that buddy was?”

“I'm not a diviner. How would I know?”

Ewar said dispassionately, “Me.”

The strategist clung to his silence, but the narrator added, with the same lack of emotion, “And do you know the identity of the faithful friend who fathered a child with my wife?”

When his companion did not respond, the narrator filled in the blanks: “It was you!”

“Me?”

“I found you coiled snake-like around her. So why deny your ability to shape-shift?”

“Ha, ha. . . .”

The narrator, however, continued to decode the talismans of the prophecies he beheld in the sky's stars: “Do you know what became of this child you fathered with your best friend's wife?”

The strategist braced himself but did not reply. Meanwhile, the narrator continued with the prophecy: “He's the fool!”

Without meaning to, the strategist yelled, “No!”

“Believe it or not, Edahi is your son.”

He was silent but then added, “Just as he is my son too.”

“Did you make up this story to convince me to confess that I can shape-shift?”

“You yourself do not believe that I could invent a story; why are you so contrary?”

The narrator returned from his travels through the sky, and stillness prevailed. Then the strategist remarked, “I don't mind telling you that I have felt a greater affection for the fool than for any other man. Is this what people call fatherhood?”

“By confessing, you will not only save my son; you will save yours as well.”

“I don't believe admitting that I have the power of metamorphosis will help.”

“Rest assured that it will.”

“What makes you so certain?”

Ewar said nothing. He made a visual sweep of emptiness enveloped in darkness. Suddenly he said, “Because if you confess, I will too.”

“You'll confess?”

“Your confession actually won't help unless I confess.”

The strategist remained silent while the visitor explained, “Didn't you once say that we only kill the one we love and only save the one we hate?”

“I always say that.”

“I goaded the fool and encouraged him to lift his hand against you.”

The strategist found nothing odd in this. He said coldly, “I was expecting you would do that one day, since revenge is our punishment for doing a good deed.”

“Not long ago we agreed that what you did the day you brought me back to life was not a good deed, but rest assured that my confession to the assembly that I goaded the fool will turn the affair head over heels . . . if preceded by your confession.” Stillness prevailed. The strategist raked the earth with his finger, tracing an arcane symbol there, before he replied, “I don't think I can do that.”

“Would you rather surrender your son's neck to the rope than renounce your fraudulent arrogance?”

“Refraining from a confession of shape-shifting is a secret matter, not a display of arrogance.”

“But the son. . . .”

“The fool is your son, not mine.”

“He's your son too: my son by the heart but yours by blood.”

“I did not want to have a descendent to recite an elegy one day for me in the desert.”

“What's that?”

“I wouldn't have acquired a reputation for cunning tactics had I not refused to leave a trace behind me in the desert.”

They were both silent. The visitor waited for a long time before he said, “We have heard of sons who sacrifice their fathers but have never heard of fathers who sacrifice their sons.”

“It's hard to forgive a son who has raised a knife to slay his father.”

“Forgiveness is the secret of our happiness. Woe to anyone in our world who does not learn how to forgive.”

“A father can forgive, but the spirit world will never forgive, even if the father does.”

“Is that your last word?”

“I can't mock my own law.”

“To which law do you refer?”

“‘We should only revive the ones we hate and only slay the ones we love.' Have you forgotten?”

The night before the fool's execution, a tempest raged through the oasis. The onslaught of that storm would not have upset people if it had not violated the law for storms. Unknown regions of the western desert had unleashed it – heavily laden with dust – one night, thereby violating an ancient rule, passed down from generation to generation, that chastises the west wind for night travel with this well-known phrase: “I'm not a slave; so why should I travel by night?” The winds from the west, however, traveled by night this time. That was unprecedented and they traveled over night and arrived with malice unparalleled in the memory of the oasis. This animosity was not merely apparent in the storm's violence but revealed itself as well in the heavy dust borne by the winds. The tempest burst free of its bonds shortly after sunset, like a demonic jinni, and attacked the oasis with a savagery people had not experienced, not even in the pillaging attacks the oasis experienced in ancient times. The tempest continued its painful wailing all through the night, and individuals with psychic powers thought the wailing an ill omen. The storm sent huts on the outskirts sailing through the air, ripped roofs off houses, and flattened some walls. The next morning, the firebrand was visible on the horizon, but dust lost no time in bringing night back to the oasis, and darkness prevailed once more. In the deserted expanses of the oasis, the wind roared again. Residents wandered blindly in search of each other, and the demon felled them in the streets. Others tried to search for their livestock only to be stopped short. The tempest did not calm down until it had taken some of them as its prey. After helping itself to these propitiatory offerings, it quieted down, as if it had decided to cut them a little slack, but this was a threatening respite, since the atmosphere continued to be heavy and gloomy. The enemy seemed to have staged a strategic retreat to muster its forces for a new attack, not for surrender. It was, however, respite enough for the residents to discover the devastation that had descended on their land. People passed on news of livestock wiped out, palm trees destroyed, sword dunes advancing from the south toward the spring, and crops strafed by flying dirt. The residents might have been concerned about the threat posed by the sands' advance toward the spring had they not been so preoccupied during this lull in the storm with searching for missing persons, whom the wind had carried off to parts unknown. During the height of that chaos, the diviner went to heroic efforts to gather all the elders for an emergency assessment of the catastrophe but only succeeded in contacting the sage, whom he bumped into outside. He tied the other man to his own body with a palm-fiber rope and then ushered him into the nearest building, a deserted house, which had just lost its whole roof, although the walls blocked the wind.

Elelli said, “We loathed the calamity with the water-borne epidemic, but this is an even worse affliction.”

Yazzal said, as he sheltered against the house's west wall and pulled his companion with him, “No affliction is easy until a worse one arrives.”

“We need to contact our companions immediately.”

“Indeed, we must quickly carry out the punishment.”

The wind was howling as it attacked the wall. The sage shouted back, “What punishment?”

The diviner, who was seeking the wall's protection from the deluge of dust, replied, “Whoever delays in carrying out a punishment, brings punishment down on his own head.”

“Do you mean the storm's a curse we acquired by being too slow to punish the fool?”

“If you promise the spirit world a sacrifice, don't be slow to deliver. This is what the lost Law has taught us.”

“Many disagree with your view.”

“The majority is a handful of wretches who never understand what must be understood.”

“They say that the wind is the spirit world's angry reaction to the sentence against the fool.”

“Rubbish! The spirit world is only angry when it seeks a blood offering.”

“It has seized many blood offerings. Indeed, the entire oasis has become a propitiatory sacrifice.”

“When people are stingy in their sacrifices to the spirit world, it takes a dreadful toll of victims, whether people like it or not.”

The wind roared; so the diviner shouted, “It's threatening us. If we don't make haste, the walls' turn will be next. Haven't you heard of the tribe that was too stingy with the spirit world to sacrifice a kid, and so the spirit world sent its messenger the wind to annihilate the whole tribe? The wind always brings a message from the spirit world; so heed it.”

The sage raised his head, but a gust struck him, ramming his skull against his companion's breast. He muttered to the diviner's chest. “I fear nothing on your behalf so much as the Law's effect on you.”

The diviner yelled, “Is the Law's effect something a man should fear?”

“The Law's impact on a man is fearsome, because the Law's commandment is a fetter.”

“Did you say: fetter?”

“A prophetic commandment is true during the moment of inspiration. A prophetic maxim is true while it remains unrestricted. Once we imprison it in a thin-necked jug, however, it becomes a self-parody.”

“A prophetic commandment is a prophetic commandment, no matter where or when. Space and time exercise no sway over prophetic dicta.”

The sage, however, said defiantly, despite the wind's assaults: “A prophetic commandment is a danger even when time hasn't touched it; so what if time has?”

“I would not be astonished to hear statements like this from foreigners. What astonishes me is to hear it from a close friend.”

The sage burst into alarming laughter and then stammered, “It's a mistake to allow anything time touches to astonish us. Time speaks through my tongue. Don't blame me!”