The Satanic Verses (20 page)

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 waterskin, 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.

 … Gibreel 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 are 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 inner courtyard of his house, his wife’s house, and will not go in to her. She is almost seventy and feels these days more like a mother than a. She, the rich woman, who employed him to manage her caravans long ago. His management skills were the first things she liked about him. And after a time, they were in love. It isn’t easy to be a brilliant, successful woman in a city where the gods are female but the females are merely goods. Men had either been afraid of her, or had thought her so strong that she didn’t need their consideration. He hadn’t been afraid, and had given her the feeling of constancy she needed. While he, the orphan, found in her many women in one: mother sister lover sibyl friend. When he thought himself crazy she was the one who believed in his visions. ‘It is the archangel,’ she told him, ‘not some fog out of your head. It is Gibreel, and you are the Messenger of God.’

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.

She comes and sits close to him on the bed, extends a finger,
finds the gap in his robe, strokes his chest. ‘Fainted,’ she murmurs. ‘That’s weakness, Mahound. Are you becoming weak?’

She places the stroking finger over his lips before he can reply. ‘Don’t say anything, Mahound. I am the Grandee’s wife, and neither of us is your friend. My husband, however, is a weak man. In Jahilia they think he’s cunning, but I know better. He knows I take lovers and he does nothing about it, because the temples are in my family’s care. Lat’s, Uzza’s, Manat’s. The – shall I call them
mosques? –
of your new angels.’ She offers him melon cubes from a dish, tries to feed him with her fingers. He will not let her put the fruit into his mouth, takes the pieces with his own hand, eats. She goes on. ‘My last lover was the boy, Baal.’ She sees the rage on his face. ‘Yes,’ she says contentedly. ‘I heard he had got under your skin. But he doesn’t matter. Neither he nor Abu Simbel is your equal. But I am.’

‘I must go,’ he says. ‘Soon enough,’ she replies, returning to the window. At the perimeter of the city they are packing away the tents, the long camel-trains are preparing to depart, convoys of carts are already heading away across the desert; the carnival is over. She turns to him again.

‘I am your equal,’ she repeats, ‘and also your opposite. I don’t want you to become weak. You shouldn’t have done what you did.’

‘But you will profit,’ Mahound replies bitterly. ‘There’s no threat now to your temple revenues.’

‘You miss the point,’ she says softly, coming closer to him, bringing her face very close to his. ‘If you are for Allah, I am for Al-Lat. And she doesn’t believe your God when he recognizes her. Her opposition to him is implacable, irrevocable, engulfing. The war between us cannot end in truce. And what a truce! Yours is a patronizing, condescending lord. Al-Lat hasn’t the slightest wish to be his daughter. She is his equal, as I am yours. Ask Baal: he knows her. As he knows me.’

‘So the Grandee will betray his pledge,’ Mahound says.

‘Who knows?’ scoffs Hind. ‘He doesn’t even know himself. He
has to work out the odds. Weak, as I told you. But you know I’m telling the truth. Between Allah and the Three there can be no peace. I don’t want it. I want the fight. To the death; that is the kind of idea I am. What kind are you?’

‘You are sand and I am water,’ Mahound says. ‘Water washes sand away.’

‘And the desert soaks up water,’ Hind answers him. ‘Look around you.’

Soon after his departure the wounded men arrive at the Grandee’s palace, having screwed up their courage to inform Hind that old Hamza has killed her brothers. But by then the Messenger is nowhere to be found; is heading, once again, slowly towards Mount Cone.

Gibreel, when he’s tired, wants to murder his mother for giving him such a damn fool nickname,
angel
, what a word, he begs
what? whom
? to be spared the dream-city of crumbling sandcastles and lions with three-tiered teeth, no more heart-washing of prophets or instructions to recite or promises of paradise, let there be an end to revelations, finito, khattam-shud. What he longs for: black, dreamless sleep. Mother-fucking dreams, cause of all the trouble in the human race, movies, too, if I was God I’d cut the imagination right out of people and then maybe poor bastards like me could get a good night’s rest. Fighting against sleep, he forces his eyes to stay open, unblinking, until the visual purple fades off the retinas and sends him blind, but he’s only human, in the end he falls down the rabbit-hole and there he is again, in Wonderland, up the mountain, and the businessman is waking up, and once again his wanting, his need, goes to work, not on my jaws and voice this time, but on my whole body; he diminishes me to his own size and pulls me in towards him, his gravitational field is unbelievable, as powerful as a goddamn megastar … and then Gibreel and the Prophet are wrestling, both naked, rolling over and over, in the cave of the fine white sand that rises around them
like a veil.
As if he’s learning me, searching me, as if I’m the one undergoing the test
.

In a cave five hundred feet below the summit of Mount Cone, Mahound wrestles the archangel, hurling him from side to side, and let me tell you he’s getting in
everywhere
, his tongue in my ear his fist around my balls, there was never a person with such a rage in him, he has to has to know he has to K N O W and I have nothing to tell him, he’s twice as physically fit as I am and four times as knowledgeable, minimum, we may both have taught ourselves by listening a lot but as is plaintosee he’s even a better listener than me; so we roll kick scratch, he’s getting cut up quite a bit but of course my skin stays smooth as a baby, you can’t snag an angel on a bloody thorn-bush, you can’t bruise him on a rock. And they have an audience, there are djinns and afreets and all sorts of spooks sitting on the boulders to watch the fight, and in the sky are the three winged creatures, looking like herons or swans or just women depending on the tricks of the light … Mahound finishes it. He throws the fight.