THE NECRONOMICON ~ The Cthulhu Revelations (13 page)

~

Away again, then, from Najran we braved the north, ever onward toward Yathrib.  We lived on succulent dates from the few oases, and strips of dried meat flensed from the few mules which we had lost.  Beneath the night skies, where the jackals called and the moon was sprayed with the silhouettes of bats, I even tasted the spice wine of the men.

In the daylight, Saheed proved to be as crafty as he was wealthy.  Ever in his dealings, he traded away only those choicest riches which women would weep for and which stately men would practically beg to touch and see.  For Saheed was a solitary glory, one of the few survivals of the
magna pigmenta
trade which had barely endured the strangling of Byzantium and the miserable death of Rome so long ago.

In Najran and farther on, I marveled at the secrets which the Caravan of the White Stallion brought from the lands afar:  white pepper-fruits from the western rim of India, pheasant eggs, almonds, galangal, vinegar and honey, clove and mastic borne by sail from the secret isles.  This caravan lord’s specialty was Phoenix Eggs, which proved to be nonesuch treasures crafted by the spice-blenders of Aden, special orbs of mixed spices uniquely fashioned and wrapped in raw silk.  For these, even kings and caliphs would throw away their pride and vie for sole possession.

Ever Saheed greatened the treasures which his caravan would carry to the spice-city of Yathrib.  But along the path, if some desperate merchant or noble’s errant-gatherer were to offer him an outrageous price for one choice treasure, then Saheed would trade.  Yet the wily master never accepted his payments in silver or in gold.  He took only other spices as his price.  In this way, as we wended our way northward, his caravan became laden with an exotic bounty the likes of which I have never since seen.

In the lonely and arduous days between encampments, I proved to be adept in the art of the scout.  My eyes were good, and my instincts for danger had already been finely honed.  The bandits proved to be little more than vagabonds and were few upon the route.

But one day, I did protect the entire caravan from a sandstorm.  I early spied the telltale devils of dust—the
Ukum
, the coils of
Harabu
—coursing toward us from far away, and knew the peril.  By the time the heat-currents shifted and the flavor of the wind had turned to ash, I had already warned Saheed of the coming storm.

He, the man of meticulous instinct, had been wise enough to believe in me.  By my warning and Saheed’s entreaty, the laborers rushed to circle the mules and fashion a wall of grain-sacks.  The guards dug in, leeward tents were erected low and holes were dug beneath them.  Still, we were barely given time to shelter and to tether the camels and save ourselves.

No one died in the raging of the storm, not even a slave.  For this, I earned great respect.

~

In the nights before this, volunteering to assist the weary watchmen in their vigil over the caravan, I had come often to walk alone upon the dunes.  I forever looked not to the west and its rocky spires, but to the east, into the emptiness where my father had fought and died and I myself had been born unto the Shepherdess.

One night, when the guard nearest to me had fallen into a fitful sleep (which he would in the morning be whipped for), I thought I heard the cry of my Adaya singing upon the desert wind.  In a delirium of want, I am told I wandered half a mile into the desert.  I was woken only by the panicked shout of the waking guard, who cried out,
“Al Ghul!  Al Ghul!”
and pointed to me as I stumbled in from the distance.

Parched and confused, sleepwalking, I woke as I returned.  That was the last night that Saheed allowed me the night vigil.  To this day I believe he kept me from that honor not in disappointment for my behavior, but to watch over me.

~

There were far more arduous times than these.  There were scorching days when I was the last to earn our failing water, and even a day without food when we were slowed and lost for hours when the windswept path faded away to sand.  And once, I woke to one of the guardsmen—Basim—trying to rape me.

At that time, I was sleeping beside the campfire of the laborers where I had sheltered exhausted beside a thicket.  Although Basim had a cord around my throat and my parched mouth was clamped shut by his hand, the vigilant sentry who was on watch had dared abandon his post—risking a whipping for himself—and had come stealthily to my aid.  This would be my friend and my protector, a desert-withered veteran named Fikri of the Seven Fingers.

Fikri pummeled the lustful Basim over his skull with a tent-stake cudgel, while Basim gloated and struggled upon me.  Caught utterly unaware, Basim’s eyes went white and rolled.  He rose, staggered a step and fell over one of the laborer’s legs.  The laborers, perhaps knowing more of the ways of Basim than did I, woke and scurried silently away.  None of them ever said anything of what next transpired.

Fikri returned Basim to consciousness by cording the villain’s throat with his own strangler, and nearly death-gripped the panicked cretin’s jaw with his three-fingered hand.

And Fikri said, that if Basim were ever to try again to take of my body without my own permission, Fikri would be certain to heat his own blade and brand the rapist’s face with the scar of a disfavored eunuch.  And if Basim then cried out as he was branded, he would make a eunuch of him then and there, so that the scar upon his face would not be a lie.

Looking into Fikri’s eyes, Basim let loose his water.  His urine ran out upon the sand and trickled into the fire.

Basim was then released.  He fled, saying nothing.  He never again touched me.

~

In my gratitude, I tried to give Fikri three pouches of Aharon’s spice.  But he refused me, and would accept only my thanks.  And this he said to me:  “Let me watch over you, jackal pup.  You’re too good a scout to lose as a fool, and so let us make the fool in you a stranger.  Perhaps the desert and I will make the rest of you more like me.  I rename you, little scamp.  Abd of the Ten Fingers, and counting.  Yes?  Perhaps one day, you will grow to be like me?”

Fikri, very proudly, held up his seven fingers.  For the first time since my Adaya had died, I laughed.

From that night, old Fikri was my idol and my mentor.  Saheed, saying nothing, seemed to approve of this.  Fikri watched over me in the nights.  I was allowed to stand awake again in the evenings, if Fikri was on guard.  He showed me how to move my place of vigil and to sense the coming of scented men from downwind, and how to look over the desert through the lens of the sand-reflected moon, as an eagle would.

Too, he gave to me a token which in my old age I treasure still:  a piece of ancient cedar, smoothed into the shape of a tusk.  This talon-charm, Fikri told me, would protect me when he himself could not.  When I asked its origin, I was made to marvel, for he told me that he had pulled a plank from a Grecian shipwreck in the Emerald Sea north of Egypt, a wreck from the age of Heracles.  Near one of the crumbling quays of Tyre, he had dived for the wood and carved and seasoned it himself.

I believe that talon protects me still.

~

Under Fikri’s tutelage I became a man of the desert.  Young I remained, but as our caravan wandered ever farther north from Najran and into the waste, no one doubted my worth.  I was becoming one of them.

When Fikri was busied during the day, as I scouted beside Saheed himself, I learned some little of the spice.  Saheed was coy, for his secrets and unique sources were many, and he still held out some hope of learning how I had come to possess the saffron and all the rest.  The spice trade of my youth was far different from the pale shadow of it which now lingers in my elder age.  Now, the armies who fight beneath the Crescent or the mercenaries of the Stars have closed off every spice road between Occident and Orient.  The great caravan tides are parched and choked away.  But within the confines of mighty Arabia, and in Yemen and the Holy Land, a scant yet vital trade in the spice continues.  The caravans are rarer now by far, yet some few journey on.  But the likes of the Caravan of the White Stallion will likely never be seen again.

(An interesting note on lined yellow paper was inserted here by Clarice Whateley, who here proves herself to be not only interested in the
Necronomicon
’s chronology, but also in the veracity of its locales and its ties to recorded history.  She writes here:  “The ability of these unknown spice caravans to travel freely indicates that the Second Islamic Civil War was, at least in this region, either waning or ended.  The fact that Saheed would take an unknown child such as Al-Azrad along with him implies not only a need of men, but also a re-opening of trade routes and a time of volatile opportunity.  These reminiscences by Al-Azrad may date, by their ending, toward 684 or 685 A.D., when he was perhaps 18 or even 20.  Of course, the non-chronological nature of Dee’s survival of
Al Azif
makes the dating of many events and lacunae excruciating.”)

~

From Fikri I learned of the many lands and tribes of the peninsula.  I believed I knew much already, from my years in Sana’a and singing to the caravans as a boy; but I discovered that the world was far greater, and far more sinister, than I had ever imagined.  My knowledge was rich indeed for one of my age, yet without my learning of written history, beyond Akram’s few translated scrolls, I had none of the revelations from the Chroniclers of Old.

I learned of the vast Badiya and how the desert shifted not only its sands, but how it devoured civilizations, and how all but the eldest sages forgot the peoples and the places it destroyed.  To the Romans, the most brilliant of our lands’ invaders, these
provinciae
were threefold:  Arabia Deserta of the wastes; Arabia Felix of the fertile pleasantries; and Arabia Petraea, the stone-lost reach of Petra, the forbidden city.  I learned too the whispers of an ever greater and more glorious city once known as Irem, the lost; and the ancient legends of a place which even the remotest tribes knew only as the Nameless City.

In how I devoured the lore of the sands, and how I was proven worthy under the watchful eye of Fikri, in time the other guards did take me in as their boon companion.  Even Basim—the knot in his skull hidden by a makeshift turban—took a grudging liking to me:  as his equal, instead of as a catamite.

Thus did the men begin to tell me far darker and more sensual tales of their many years in the desert.  In return, I would sing for them of Sana’a and its secrets, and I too would drink.  But I was not only there to revel and bask in the men’s laughter and their praisings.  All they taught me, I committed to memory.

I even began to write, faltering though my hand was, on a poorly-seasoned papyrus which Saheed had allowed me in lieu of one day’s pay.  Those notes in cuttlefish ink were lost to the winds in later years, as I journeyed toward Jerusalem; but my craft with the stylus and scroll forever improved.  The talent has never left me.

~

When at last we were near to Yathrib, a day or two hither, came the time of my destiny.

We had lost a day to a mule with a broken leg, and the slaughtering of the pathetic thing for meat.  Its run had scattered four spice-laden camels to the desert, and these by Basim and his companions were pursued.  When we finally had them all tethered and returned, it was too late for the caravan to rise up and continue.  Saheed therefore decided that we would remain there until the following evening, when our travel would resume.  And so that night was chosen for celebration, honoring me for the time of the sandstorm, when my quick warning had saved the caravan from loss.

That joyous night, as the bonfire of celebration burned high, Saheed brought to me an outsider:  Fatimah, the blind woman who would later steer and fix the course of my life.

~

Of Fatimah I will tell in time.  When I went away with her, I was mournful to leave Fikri and Saheed.  To Fikri I said farewell, a sincere and dear parting, and with a hiding of tears he fumblingly embraced me.

But Saheed?

I had never known my father; and Saheed was a great and goodly Patriarch.  In leaving him that night, I did kiss his brow.  I know he was awake; otherwise I would not have dared it, for he was ever alert and I could well have been stabbed if I had woken him in alarm.  But he did not stir.  And that, to me, was his farewell, an acceptance of my decision to leave him and accompany Fatimah, before we ever did come unto Yathrib.

And I now know—from the later time when I was blessed to meet again with Saheed the aged, twenty-three years thereafter—that he understood why I needed then to leave him.  He
did
know of the Ghuls, that crafty wolf; and he had suspected my loss and my obsession.  But he had hoped that in feigning ignorance of my path, he might dissuade me from it, or even lead me into a good life in the spice trade of the desert.

But Fatimah the blind had seen into my heart more deeply than good Saheed ever could.  I did love Saheed, and dearly, but my obsession to raise my Adaya from the dead was everything to me.

SCROLL XXIII

The Tale Which Draweth Blood ~

Of the Horrors of the Desert,

And the Truths Which Lie Beneath

After my time with the Caravan of the White Stallion, Fatimah did lead me on into a more majestic and far more savage world than I had ever known.

In my time with each of the caravans, I learned much.  Even later, in the east toward the ruins of Babylon, other guards beyond the companions of Fikri and Saheed would come to adore me as their loremaster and storyteller.  When they would drink, and I would bind their wounds, they would speak only of pain and hunger and their own misery.  But deep in the night when they are sung to, and their brethren are asleep and the last man on vigil sits awake beside you, hearing your elegies of love lost and the mysteries of the wasteland ...

... In those hours, that man will confess all to you, and entrust you with his greatest fears.