Persia
Long Ago
The thing always appeared in the hour between sunset and full dark.
When the light began to wane in the afternoon, casting shadows of gray and violet across the stable yard below the tower where he worked, Reza would give himself over to shuddering waves of anxiety and anticipation. Each day, as evening approached, memory inevitably carried him back sixty years, to the arms of his wet nurse. The twilight hour is when the jinn grow restless, she had told him. She was Turkish, and never threw his bathwater out the window without asking the pardon of the hidden folk who lived in the ground below. If she failed to warn them, the indignant creatures might curse her young charge, afflicting him with blindness or the spotted disease.
When Reza was a young student, and had not yet learned wisdom, he dismissed her fears as superstition.
Now he was an old man with failing teeth. As the sun flushed up, touching the dome of the shah's palace across the square, a familiar terror began to provoke his bowels. His apprentice loitered at the back of the workroom, picking over the remains of his master's lunch. Reza could feel the contemptuous look the pimpled youth leveled at his back as he stood in the window, watching the progress of the dying sun.
"Bring me the manuscript," said Reza, without turning. "Set out my inkwell and my reed pens. Make everything ready."
"Yes, master." The youth's tone was surly. He was the third son of a minor noble, and had neither scholarly nor spiritual inclinations to speak of. Once-only once-Reza had allowed the boy to remain when the thing visited him, hoping his apprentice would see, and understand, and tell Reza he was not mad. He did not. When the creature arrived, congealing inside the chalk-and-ash summoning circle Reza had drawn at the center of the workroom, the boy did not appear to notice. He stared at his master in blank irritation as the shadow in the circle unfolded itself and grew limbs, caricaturing the form of a man. When Reza addressed the apparition, the boy had laughed, scorn and disbelief mingling in his ringing voice.
"Why?" Reza had asked the creature desperately. "Why won't you let him see you?"
In response, the thing had grown teeth: row after row of them, crowded together in a sickening grin.
He chooses not to see, it said.
Reza worried that the boy would report his master's clandestine activities to his father, who would then alert the orthodox functionaries at the palace, who in turn would have him imprisoned for sorcery. But his apprentice had said nothing, and continued to return day after day for his lessons. It was only the lethargy of his service and the contempt in his voice that told Reza he had lost the boy's respect.
"The ink has dried on the pages I wrote yesterday," Reza said when his apprentice returned with his pens and ink. "They're ready for preservation. Have you mixed more varnish?"
The boy looked up at him, color draining from his face.
"I can't," he said, surliness evaporating. "Please. It's too awful. I don't want to-"
"Very well," said Reza with a sigh. "I'll do it myself. You can go."
The boy bolted for the door.
Reza sat down at his table, pulling a large stone bowl toward himself. The work would distract him until evening arrived. Into the bowl, he poured a portion of the precious mastic resin that had been simmering over a charcoal brazier since early morning. He added several drops of black oil from the seed of the nigella and stirred to keep the liquid from hardening. When he was satisfied with the consistency of the mixture, he gingerly lifted the linen veil from an unassuming metal pot sitting at one end of the work table.
A scent filled the room: sharp, alarming, viscerally female. Reza thought of his wife, alive and blooming and big with the child that had died with her. This scent had permeated the linens of their bed before Reza ordered his servants to carry it away and burn it. For a moment, he felt lost. Forcing himself to be impassive, he separated what he needed from the viscous mess and, lifting it with metal tongs, dropped it unceremoniously into the cooling bowl of varnish. He counted out several minutes on his knuckles before looking in the bowl again. The varnish had turned as clear and glistening as honey.
Reza carefully laid out the pages he had transcribed during the creature's last visit. He wrote in Arabic, not Persian, hoping that this precaution would prevent his work from being misused should it fall into the hands of the uneducated and uninitiated. The manuscript was thus a double translation: first into Persian from the voiceless language in which the creature spoke, which fell on Reza's ears like the night echoes of childhood, when sleep was preceded by that solitary, fearful journey between waking and dreaming. Then from Persian into Arabic, the language of Reza's education, as mathematical and efficient as the creature's speech was diffuse.
The result was perplexing. The stories were there, rendered as well as Reza could manage, but something had been lost. When the creature spoke, Reza would drift into a kind of trance, watching strange shapes amplify themselves again and again, until they resembled mountains, coastlines, the pattern of frost on glass. In these moments he felt sure he had accomplished his desire, and the sum of knowledge was within his reach. But as soon as the stories were fixed on paper, they shifted. It was as if the characters themselves-the princess, the nurse, the bird king, and all the rest-had grown sly and slipped past Reza as he attempted to render them in human proportions.
Reza dipped a horsehair brush into the stone bowl and began to coat the new pages in a thin layer of varnish. The nigella oil prevented the heavy paper from buckling. The other ingredient, the one his apprentice had obtained with so much misgiving, would keep the manuscript alive long after Reza himself had gone, protecting it from decay. If he could not unlock the true meaning behind the thing's words, someone would, someday.
Reza was so intent on his work that he did not notice when the sun slid past the dome of the palace, disappearing behind the dry peaks of the Zagros Mountains on the far horizon. A chill in the room alerted him to the coming of twilight. Reza's heart began to tap at his breastbone. Carefully, before the fear took hold in earnest, he placed the varnished pages on a screen to dry. On a shelf nearby were their companions, a thick sheaf of them, awaiting the completion of the final story. Once he was finished, Reza would sew the pages together with silk thread and bind them between linen-covered pasteboards.
And then what?
The voice came, as always, from within his own mind. Reza straightened, his stiff joints cracking as he moved. He steadied his breathing.
"Then I will study," he said in a calm voice. "I will read each story again and again until I have committed them all to memory and their power becomes clear to me."
The thing seemed amused. It had appeared without a sound, and sat quietly within the confines of its chalk-and-ash prison at the center of the room, regarding Reza with yellow eyes. Reza suppressed a shudder. The sight of the creature still filled him with warring sensations of horror and triumph. When Reza had first summoned it, he had half-disbelieved that such a powerful entity could be held at bay by a few well-chosen words written on the floor, words his illiterate housekeeper could sweep away without incurring any harm whatsoever. But it was so-a testament, he hoped, to the depth of his learning. Reza had bound the thing successfully, and now it was compelled to return day after day until it completed the narration of its stories.
"I will study," it says. The thing's voice was spiteful. But what can it hope to gain? The Alf Yeom is beyond its understanding.
Reza drew his robes about him and squared his shoulders, attempting to look dignified.
"So you claim, but your race was never known for honesty."
At least we're honest with ourselves, and do not covet what is not ours. Man was exiled from the Garden for eating a single fruit, and now you propose to uproot the whole tree without the angels noticing. You're an old fool, and the Deceiver whispers in your ear.
"I am an old fool." Reza sat down heavily on his workbench. "But now it's too late to be otherwise. The only way forward is through. Let me complete my work, and I will release you."
The thing howled piteously and slammed itself against the edge of the circle. It was immediately knocked backward, rebuffed by a barrier Reza had created but could not see.
What do you want? the creature whimpered. Why do you force me to tell you what I should not? These are not your stories. They are ours.
"They are yours, but you don't understand them," snapped Reza. "Only Adam was given true intellect, and only the banu adam have the power to call things by their right names. What you call the bird king and the hind and the stag-these are only symbols to disguise a hidden message, just as a poet may write a ghazal about a toothless lion to criticize a weak king. Hidden in your stories is the secret power of the unseen."
The stories are their own message, said the thing, with something like a sigh. That's the secret.
"I will assign each element of each story a number," said Reza, ignoring this alarming pronouncement. "And in doing so create a code that determines their quantitative relationship to one another. I will gain power over them-" He broke off. A breeze had stirred through the open window and the scent of drying varnish wafted toward him. Reza thought again of his wife.
You've lost something, said the creature shrewdly.
"It's not your problem."
No story or code or secret on earth can raise the dead.
"I don't want raise the dead. I just want to know-I want-"
The thing listened. Its yellow eyes were fixed and unblinking. Reza remembered the herbal remedies and the cupping and the incense to clear the air and the low terse words of the midwives as they moved about the bloody bed, pulling their veils over their mouths to speak to him as he stood by, useless and despairing.
"Control," he said finally.
The creature sat back, draping its not-arms over its not-knees, and regarded him.
Get your pen and paper, it said. I will tell you the final story. It comes with a warning.
"What's that?"
When you hear it, you will become someone else.
"What nonsense."
The creature smiled.
Get your pen, it repeated.