Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (28 page)

“I will,” he says.

“Then get on with it,” she tells him, and twists the cap tightly back onto the bottle.

“It’s one of the stories that Scheherazade relates to Shahryar and Dinazade, but one that didn’t make it into Burton’s
The Book of the Thousand lights and a Night,
or into any of the earlier European translations. I suspect it was originally imported into the
Red Book of Riyadh
from another source, possibly the Persian
Isíhtsöornot
or from the writing of Abd-al-Hazred, though I was never able to confirm this, mind you. It’s possible—”

“Just the story, please,” she cuts in, trying not to sound annoyed, but sounding annoyed, anyway.

He apologizes and keeps his eyes trained on the ceiling, on the ruined plaster and paint above the bed. He was a scholar, once, and, to him, the origins of the tales are almost as fascinating as the tales themselves; he has trouble remembering that not everyone share’s his enthusiasm.

“I’m listening,” she says, prompting him. “The clock’s ticking,” (even though there is no clock in the room, and she doesn’t wear a wrist watch).

And so, his head and belly warm from the brandy, and the howling wind seeming not so close and not so cold, the young man begins his story with the usual preamble. Scheherazade whispering the opening lines of a story to her sister; the King awakening, and at once captivated by what he hears; the Queen consort informing Shahryar, regretfully, that the sun was rising, and so her beheading would mean that she’d be unable to conclude the tale; and, finally, the King granting yet another stay of execution, so that he might hear the remainder of her cliffhanger.

“You
think
the silly bastard would see through her maneuvers, sooner or later,” the changeling woman says. She’s gone back to cleaning her revolver. “No one ever bothers to point out what an idiot this Sassanid ‘king of kings’ must have been.”

“Most don’t even remember that he
is
Sassanid, and therefore Zoroastrian, instead of Muslim.”

“That’s because most don’t give
two
shits,” she replies, then turns her attention to the revolver’s extractor assembly.

He agrees this is true, and then resumes his story.

“This was, of course, long, long before the war between the Ghul and the other races of the Djinn—the Ifrit, the Sila, and the Marid. In those days, the men of the desert still looked upon all the Djinn as gods, though they’d already learned to fear the night shades, the Ghul, and guarded their children and the graves of their dead against them. Among all the fates that might be fa I the soul of a man or woman, to have one’s corpse stolen and then devoured by the Ghul was counted as one of the most gruesome and tragic conceivable. It was thought by many that to be so consumed would mean that the deceased would be taken from the cold sleep of
barzakh
, never to meet with the angels Nakir and Munkar, and so never be interrogated and prepared for Paradise.

“It was thought that the Ghul, the night shades, were also shape shifters. It was said that they were especially fond of appearing in the form of hyenas, but that they could also come as scorpions, vipers, and even vultures.”

“Are you entirely certain that you’re not making this up?” the changeling woman asks, without pausing in her work or even glancing at the young man.

“I’m not,” he replies. “Not making this up, I mean. Why?”

“Because I know the tales of the
Red Book
, backwards and forwards, as well as any warren rat, and this is the first I’ve heard about hyenas and vultures and shape shifting,
that’s
why.”

“Have you ever read from the book yourself? Have you ever even held a copy in your hands?” There’s no challenge in these questions, as the young man has long since learned not to impugn his captors; rather, there’s only curiosity, and curiosity is the only thing the changeling woman hears.

“Of course I haven’t,” she replies. “It’s forbidden. We learn the book, what we are told we need to know of it, from the ghouls.” He’s silent a moment, listening to the rumble of a snow plow passing by somewhere not far away, and the young man considers the glamours that keep the terrible old house on Federal Hill, and its inhabitants and prisoners, hidden in plain view.

“I’m telling you what I read,” he says, and when she doesn’t argue, he goes back to the story “In those days, there lived a woman to whom Allah had gifted seven sons. Naturally, she was very grateful for them, and yet, regardless, she still desired with all her heart to bear a daughter. So she asked this of Allah, that she might give birth to a baby girl.

“And soon afterwards, she was walking alone through a marketplace, this woman with seven sons. When she saw a mound of white goat cheese, she was so moved by the sight so that she exclaimed, “My Lord Allah! Give me, I entreat thee, a daughter every bit as white and fair and beautiful as this goats’ cheese, and I will call her Ijbeyneh.

“Allah heard her prayer, and very soon she was sent an exceedingly beautiful girl, with skin as fair as goat-milk cheese, a daughter with the delicate throat of a gazelle, with blue eyes like blazing sapphires, and hair as black as pitch. The woman kept her word, and the girl was named Ijbeyneh. Everyone in the village who chanced to look upon her loved her at once and without reservation, with the exception of the daughters of her mother’s sisters, her cousins, and
they
were very jealous.”

“She was
named
after goat cheese?” the changeling woman asks, and she glares at the man on the bed, naked and wrapped in the threadbare patchwork quilt.

“That’s what the
Red Book
says,” he replies. “That’s what I read there.”

She laughs, and shakes her head skeptically, then tells him to continue.

“So, when she was seven, Ijbeyneh begged her jealous cousins to please take her with them on one of their walks in the fores:. The girl was innocent and had no inkling of her cousins’ true (beings for her. They often went deep into the forest, to pick the fruit and berries there, and came back with tales of the marvels they saw. Anyway, the cousins agreed, much to the girl’s delight, and Ijbeyneh went with them. The day passed quickly, and when shed filled her
tarbì’ah
with ripe berries—”

“Wait, what?” the changeling woman interrupts, and she sets aside the revolver’s extractor assembly and the worn-out tooth brush she’s been using to clean it. “She filled her
what
with berries?”

“Her
tarbì’ah
,” the man answers patiently. “It a traditional linen veil, still worn, for example, by Palestinian women.”

The changeling nods and stares out the single window in the room, and she frowns when she sees that it’s snowing hard again. “You can bet the roads are going to be a bitch,” she says.

Then, when a minute or two has passed, and she hasn’t sail anything more, the lean young man asks her if he can please go on with the story.

“Sure,” she replies, wondering if she should call the Bailiff and suggest that maybe the drive to Warwick, and what she has to do there, could be postponed until the roads are clear.

“As I was saying,” the man on the bed continues, “Ijbeyneh left her berries at the base of a tree and, on her own, wandered off to pick the wild flowers growing between the enormous sycamore figs. But, later, when she returned, she found that her
tarbì’ah
was filled with ugly, poisonous berries, instead of the delicious, sweet ones she’d worked so hard to gather. Also, her jealous cousins wen gone, and she was left alone in the forest. She wandered through the hills, calling out to them, but no one and nothing answered her calls, except for the birds and a few buzzing insects. Finally when Ijbeyneh tried to find her way home again, she discovered that she’d strayed from the trail, and she quickly became disoriented and lost in the forest.

“When the sun had set, a fearsome Ghul woman crept up from a cave and came upon her. Surely, the ghoul would have devoured Ijbeyneh, but, as the child was Allah’s gift to her mother, she was protected, after a fashion. Instead of eating the girl, the ghoul found her heart was filled with pity for her. And, seeing the ghoul, Ijbeyneh cried out, ‘Oh, my Aunt! Please tell me which way my cousins have gone! And which way is home!’ The ghoul answered her, “I don’t know, Beloved, but come back and live with me, at least until your cousins return for you.’

“Ijbeyneh agreed, and the ghulah took her to a cave near the very summit of the mountain. There, the child became a shepherdess, and, as the years passed—for her cousins never did come back—the Ghul grew extremely fond of her. Every night, when the ghoul woman hunted in the forest, and in the rocky desert beyond the forest, she brought only her choicest kills back to the girl. The ghulah would not ever eat until after the girl had eaten. And in a hundred other ways, the Djinn tried to make Ijbeyneh happy and her life a comfortable one. For her, fine silks and ointments were stolen from caravans bound for the city, and for her, too, the ghoul woman found precious stones deep in the cave and polished them for Ijbeyneh to wear. In many ways, as the months came and went, the fair child grew in habit very much like her mistress, learning, for example, to eat the flesh of men and woman taken from the village graves that the ghoul sometimes robbed.

“But, despite the ghulah’s best and most determined efforts, despite her love and constant attentions, the girl was not ever happy there on the mountain. Often, she wept for her home and her parents, and she cursed her jealous, traitorous cousins. Meanwhile, in the village, all the many white doves belonging to her father, which Ijbeyneh had fed and tended before she was lost, longed endlessly for the missing daughter’s return. They did not coo, as they once had. And whenever they flew, their eyes searched all the wide land for any sign of her. In time, a day came when the doves espied the girl, there on the mountainside, minding the ghulah’s flock. Even though she was now a young woman, they recognized her immediately, and they went straight away to Ijbeyneh, lighting on the ground all about her, and showed their joy at having found her alive and well.”

“This is starting to sound more like something you looted from Charles Perrault or the Brothers Grimm,” the changeling woman says. She presses a thumb gently to the pistol’s extractor rod, and begins to clean the underside of the assembly.

“I assure you that I didn’t,” the young man tells her. “But, if you wish for me to stop—”

“I didn’t fucking
say
that, now did I?”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Whatever and whoever you were before,” the woman says, “you are
now
a whore, a whore who doesn’t even get paid for his services, a whore whom I could kill and no one would even bother to ask why. So don’t second-guess me, or presume what I do and don’t want. Just finish the damned story.”

The man nods. This is nothing he hasn’t heard before, from her lips and from the lips of others. These are words that have become casual, that have long since lost their sting and become no more to him than any other truism: crows are black, water’s wet, fire burns, and he’s a slave in the service of the changelings, completely at their mercy, and will be until the day they at last have no use for him.

“Should I remind you I don’t have all night,” the woman mutters, trying to scrub away an especially stubborn and all-but inaccessible bit of grime. “The doves found the girl named after goat cheese, and then what?”

The young man rolls over on his right side, rolling towards the changeling woman, and he reaches for the bottle of brandy. The bed springs squeak loudly. “When she saw them,” he says, “Ijbeyneh wept with delight, and she commanded them, ‘O ye doves of my mother and of my father, go to them and tell them that their daughter, the dear one, keeps sheep in the high meadows of the mountain. Let them know I have not perished.’ And, at once, they flew back to the village.

“Now, years before, the jealous cousins had claimed that the girl had been lost in the forest, though sometimes they told the story so that she’d been set upon by jackals, or a lion, and eaten alive. Her father and her brothers, her uncles and many other men from the village, had searched the hills for her. Her mother took the blame upon herself, weeping endlessly and declaring that this was Allah’s curse upon her for not having been content with seven sons.”

The lean young man pauses to sip from the rim of the bottle of brandy, and for a moment he watches the changeling clean her gun. The wind is blowing so hard now that even the liquor cannot keep a shiver at bay, and he wraps himself tighter in the frayed quilt.

“As I said, the doves had stopped cooing, when they were no longer cared for by Ijbeyneh. However, after they found her on the mountain, their disposition suddenly changed. The birds ceased to mourn, and became lively again. What’s more, it seemed as though they were endeavoring to communicate something to their keepers. A neighbor, struck by the very odd behavior of the doves, convinced Ijbeyneh’s father he should learn which way the birds flew every day. He did this, and when he was sure, he gathered together the brothers and the uncles and all those in the village who still adored the fair girl, and, together, this band followed the doves deep into the mountains and up to the high grazing meadows.

“But it had never been Ijbeyneh’s intention to be rescued. She’d only wished to have her parents know that she’d not died. In the year’s since the Djinn had taken her in, the girl had grown to love the ghulah, and had even consented to become the night shade’s concubine. Her home was no longer her father’s house, or the safety of the village, but the wild mountainside and the grotto where the ghulah, whom she still called Aunt, pampered her and taught her dark secrets unknown to the sons and daughters of Allah.”

“Stop,” the changeling woman says, and she puts down the gun and the oily scrap of linen she’d been scrubbing at it with. She turns in her chair and glowers at the young man, who does as he’s been told, and is now having another sip of the ginger brandy.

“You said that the ghulah had
failed
to make her happy. But
now
you’re saying that they’re lovers, and that goat-cheese girl doesn’t want to be rescued and go home to mamma and papa?”