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And finds, after hours of searching, what he knew would be waiting, in a dark corner of the city's outer walls, the thing of his vision, the red manticore with the triple row of teeth. The manticore has blue eyes and a ma
It has been a night of masks. Walking the debauched Jahilian streets, his heart full of bile, Hamza has seen men and women in the guise of eagles, jackals, horses, gryphons, salamanders, wart-hogs, rocs; welling up from the murk of the alleys have come two-headed amphisbaenae and the winged bulls known as Assyrian sphinxes. Dji
In the grip of a self-destructive unhappiness the three disciples had started drinking, and owing to their unfamiliarity with alcohol they were soon not just intoxicated but stupid-drunk. They stood in a small piazza and started abusing the passers-by, and after a while the water-carrier Khalid brandished his water-skin, boasting. He could destroy the city, he carried the ultimate weapon. Water: it would cleanse Jahilia the filthy, wash it away, so that a new start could be made from the purified white sand. That was when the lion-men started chasing them, and after a long pursuit they were cornered, the booziness draining out of them on account of their fear, they were staring into the red masks of death when Hamza arrived just in time.
...Gibrccl floats above the city watching the fight. It's quickly over once Hamza gets to the scene. Two masked assailants run away, two lie dead. Bilal, Khalid and Salman have been cut, but not too badly. Graver than their wounds is the news behind the lion-masks of the dead. ‘Hind's brothers,’ Hamza recognizes. ‘Things arc finishing for us now.’
Slayers of manticores, water-terrorists, the followers of Mahound sit and weep in the shadow of the city wall.
As for him, Prophet Messenger Businessman: his eyes are open now. He paces the i
He can't won't see her now. She watches him through a stone-latticed window. He can't stop walking, moves around the courtyard in a random sequence of unconscious geometries, his footsteps tracing out a series of ellipses, trapeziums, rhomboids, ovals, rings. While she remembers how he would return from the caravan trails full of stories heard at wayside oases. A prophet, Isa, born to a woman named Maryam, born of no man under a palm-tree in the desert. Stories that made his eyes shine, then fade into a distantness. She recalls his excitability: the passion with which he'd argue, all night if necessary, that the old nomadic times had been better than this city of gold where people exposed their baby daughters in the wilderness. In the old tribes even the poorest orphan would be cared for. God is in the desert, he'd say, not here in this miscarriage of a place. And she'd reply, Nobody's arguing, my love, it's late, and tomorrow there are the accounts.
She has long ears; has already heard what he said about Lat, Uzza, Manat. So what? In the old days he wanted to protect the baby daughters of Jahilia; why shouldn't he take the daughters of Allah under his wing as well? But after asking herself this question she shakes her head and leans heavily on the cool wall beside her stone-screened window. While below her, her husband walks in pentagons, parallelograms, six-pointed stars, and then in abstract and increasingly labyrinthine patterns for which there are no names, as though unable to find a simple line.
When she looks into the courtyard some moments later, however, he has gone.
The Prophet wakes between silk sheets, with a bursting headache, in a room he has never seen. Outside the window the sun is near its savage zenith, and silhouetted against the whiteness is a tall figure in a black hooded cloak, singing softly in a strong, low voice. The song is one that the women of Jahilia chorus as they drum the men to war.
He recognizes Hind's voice, sits up, and finds himself naked beneath the creamy sheet. He calls to her: ‘Was I attacked?’ Hind turns to him, smiling her Hind smile. ‘Attacked?’ she mimics him, and claps her hands for breakfast. Minions enter, bring, serve, remove, scurry off. Mahound is helped into a silken robe of black and gold; Hind, exaggeratedly, averts her eyes. ‘My head,’ he asks again. ‘Was I struck?’ She stands at the window, her head hung low, playing the demure maid. ‘Oh, Messenger, Messenger,’ she mocks him. ‘What an ungallant Messenger it is. Couldn't you have come to my room consciously, of your own will? No, of course not, I repel you, I'm sure.’ He will not play her game. ‘Am I a prisoner?’ he asks, and again she laughs at him. ‘Don't be a fool.’ And then, shrugging, relents: ‘I was walking the city streets last night, masked, to see the festivities, and what should I stumble over but your unconscious body? Like a drunk in the gutter, Mahound. I sent my servants for a litter and brought you home. Say thank you.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I don't think you were recognized,’ she says. ‘Or you'd be dead, maybe. You know how the city was last night. People overdo it. My own brothers haven't come home yet.’
It comes back to him now, his wild anguished walk in the corrupt city, staring at the souls he had supposedly saved, looking at the simurgh-effigies, the devil-masks, the behemoths and hippogriffs. The fatigue of that long day on which he climbed down from Mount Cone, walked to the town, underwent the strain of the events in the poetry marquee, – and afterwards, the anger of the disciples, the doubt, – the whole of it had overwhelmed him. ‘I fainted,’ he remembers.