The Steel Seraglio (16 page)

Some time toward morning, the fever broke; or else God relented and withdrew. Hakkim came slowly back to himself, slumped over the stone, his breath sounding in his chest like a dying rat thrashing inside a paper lantern, his cold, waxen skin running sweat in the way a half-scalded cheese runs with whey.

It was a terrible irony that Hakkim’s punishment should become his vision, and therefore the foundation of his spiritual life. He clung to the stone, and the stone welcomed his embrace.

It was the burden of negative thought, Rasoul had said. It did not seem a burden now.

As the first cocks began to crow in the neighbouring yards, Hakkim took the stone into his master’s chamber and brought it to his master’s bed. He stood there in the dawn light, the burden of negative thought cradled in his hands like an infant. He spoke his master’s name, calmly but commandingly.

Rasoul opened bleary eyes, half-seeing, half-rising from the shallow, milky well of the dreams that come after the dawn.

“Quietly,” he mumbled. “The birds—”

Hakkim let go of the stone, which in falling crushed Rasoul’s head to a pink, bone-seeded pulp. Then he went through the house to his own room, packed his meagre belongings, a skin of water, some bread. He left while the muezzins were still singing the faithful of a thousand churches to a thousand devotions: he held none of those holies in his heart, and he saw, with the clarity of youth and sickness, how strong that made him.

Hakkim’s second master, Drihud Ben Din, was an Ascetic, a denier of pleasure. The boy sought him out by reputation, and auditioned him rigorously while seeming to submit himself to the master’s interrogation. The questions Ben Din asked him about his habits both of thought and of life pleased him—they implied an austere and self-denying lifestyle, in which negative thought, so far from being eschewed and punished, was elevated to its proper status. Through negatives, through denial, we come at last to the truth: without them we labour forever in the
qu’aha sul jidani
, the labyrinth of masks.

In the Ascetic’s house, Hakkim flourished—although he would not have used that word, with its overtones of vegetable excess. He grew straight and upright, toward the light, never deviating to any direction that might be marked on a compass, never falling for the snares that the world sets in the path of the righteous.

Ascetic: a barbarous word, of Occidental provenance. It comes from the
askesis
, the emptying out, of the appetites, the intellect, the habits both of thought and action. Hakkim experienced now the transcendent consequences of that emptying: his soul filled up with itself, balancing the pressure of the world and holding him in perfect, dynamic equipoise.

Drihud Ben Din was most impressed with his disciple. He had never before encountered such self-abnegation, such steadfast will, in a boy so young. He tutored Hakkim well in the tenets of his new faith, until the day came when Hakkim began to add to those tenets himself and to expound their wisdom to his master more eloquently than the older man could express them himself. “You are ready now,” Ben Din said approvingly, “to test yourself in the Jidur.”

The Jidur, the Garden of Voices, was a place unique to Bessa. It was a large public square, paved with pink stone, where it was the right of any marabout to bid against other holy men and visionaries for the souls of passers-by, using as coin his eloquence and his sanctity. To the Jidur, then, Hakkim set forth, early enough in the day that the sky was the same colour as the stones beneath his feet. He was the first to arrive, and he picked the choicest spot, at the centre of the square where four wooden benches had been set underneath an old and wide-spreading lemon tree, to allow weary travellers a momentary respite from the heat. A fat and oleaginous adept of the Tsevre school, arriving some minutes later, argued without much conviction that this highly desirable pitch belonged by rights to him, but Hakkim was not to be cajoled or browbeaten. He held his ground, as the other spaces around the square began to fill up, and the Tsevretist retired at length with bad grace to stand out in the heat of the day.

When the sun was as high as the upper branches of the lemon tree, the first curious souls began to wander in from the adjacent streets to see what flavours of enlightenment were on offer that day. Hakkim was ready to receive them; or at least he thought he was, until the moment when he opened his mouth.

“The pursuit of pleasure is as hollow and futile as the pursuit of a beautiful woman,” he opened. His voice sounded a little weak and quavering even to himself, but it was the first proposition he had ever offered up in public, and he was confident that his delivery would improve. Unfortunately, in the moment of hesitation that these thoughts occasioned, a Durukhar marabout who was stationed to Hakkim’s left, and who had not yet begun his own sermon, spoke up.

“That’s an unfortunate simile,” he said. “They might be one and the same thing. When a man pursues a beautiful woman, surely pleasure is exactly what he promises himself.”

“And that promise,” Hakkim agreed, only mildly outfaced by the objection, “is deceitful, for the pleasure that woman brings is fleeting, like all—”

“Have you ever experienced the pleasure that woman brings?” asked a sceptic sitting comfortably with his back to the base of the lemon tree. “You look a little young.”

“All pleasures,” said Hakkim sententiously, “are alike in that they divert the flesh at the expense of the mind and soul. For everywhere in life, we find—”

“Wait, wait, wait,” said the Durukhar, who was evidently of a pedantic turn of mind. “All pleasures divert the flesh? What about solving a rebus or a riddle? That’s a pleasure that diverts the mind.”

Hakkim was momentarily gravelled by this, but he dived into the breach as best he could. “The mind is of the flesh,” he pointed out, stammering a little now. “The brain is the seat of intellect, and the brain is a bodily organ. Therefore all pleasures of the intellect are pleasures of the flesh.”

“That’s ridiculous,” a third man piped up. He was cradling a lemon in his hand, but it was not apparent whether he intended to eat it or throw it—both pursuits were allowed in the Jidur. “So there’s no difference between fucking and arguing?”

“Certainly my wife can do both at once,” the man sitting under the tree observed, and the sally was approved with loud guffaws all round.

The pestilential Durukhar perceived now that he was in a position to drive off the opposition. “And it were as much nourishment to think about eating a sherbet as actually to taste it—since the pleasure in each case is comparable.”

“Comparable in kind,” Hakkim corrected his rival angrily. “Not in degree. My point is—”

“So what, wise master, is the rate of exchange?” asked the Durukhar, with feigned politeness. “How many times must one think about a sherbet before one has attained the same amount of pleasure as could be had by tasting it?” The crowd laughed, encouraging the Durukhar to further efforts. “And would you advise the same approach with your beautiful woman? You could think many times about enjoying her, instead of essaying her once.”

“He’s thinking about her now,” jeered the man with the lemon, seeing Hakkim’s furious blush. There was more laughter, and a number of vulgar exhortations.

It might, even then, have been possible to regain the attention of the crowd and build again from some more propitious foundation; but the Durukhar, inspired by the reception of his previous jest, now embarked upon a pantomime in which Hakkim approached an imagined lady, kissed and caressed her invisible body with great enthusiasm, and then was beaten away by her invisible fists. The crowd were ecstatic, their yells of delight and coarse catcalls quite drowning out Hakkim’s attempts to address them again. When he raised his voice to be heard above the uproar, the man with the lemon let fly—the fruit smacked hard against the side of Hakkim’s face, leaving a red welt. The Durukhar opined that Hakkim’s mysterious woman had left some of her rouge on his cheek when she kissed him goodbye.

Beaten to the wide, Hakkim slunk away. He spent the rest of the day hiding in an olive grove, replaying the debacle in his mind with many different outcomes, all of them much more favourable to himself. In the evening he went back to his master’s house and told him that the day had gone well.

That night, Hakkim was visited by an unsettling dream; or rather by the absence of a dream, since on waking he could not remember exactly what it was that had troubled his sleep. He only knew that he had been fleeing from some terrible thing, as black as pitch, without shape or substance, which hated him and pursued him with deadly, ferocious intent. It seemed to come from below, to rise about him like a maw, open to swallow him down, until he wrenched himself desperately into wakefulness at the last moment before he was consumed. Lying in his straw cot in the pre-dawn dark, he pressed both hands against his narrow chest to keep his heart from leaping out of its bounds. The fear that gripped him was more terrible than anything he had ever felt.

If the first day of Hakkim’s career as a marabout had been unsuccessful, the second was an unqualified disaster. The Durukhar was back in the same spot, and was delighted to see Hakkim arrive. Hakkim tried to avoid him, but the Durukhar swapped pitches to be next to him again when he spoke. It was clear that he saw Hakkim very much in the light of a straight man; more distressingly, Hakkim realised, it was very easy to cast him in such a mould. His earnest statements could be misinterpreted in a great variety of ways, and his over-complex metaphors could be made to fall in upon themselves at a single touch.

Hakkim fought back with all the weapons at his disposal: reason and truth, precept and example, parable and exhortation. They were useless. The Durukhar’s words ran over and about him like rats, evaded his grasp, withdrew before him and then bit and clawed him from covert. Even silence couldn’t help him—if he said nothing, the Durukhar supplied his half of the dialogue, too, to hilarious and crowd-pleasing effect. Once more, Hakkim retired without a single convert, and the Durukhar as he left switched from comic to didactic mode without so much as a pause.

Every day for fourteen days, Hakkim went to the Jidur. Fourteen times he broke against the same rock. Every night for fourteen nights he woke with screams rising in his throat as the hateful, night-black tide of his dreaming rose to swallow him whole.

Just before the dawn of the fifteenth day, after the latest of these nocturnal ordeals, Hakkim prayed at the peculiar shrine he kept in the corner of his room. The shrine was a squat, grey boulder: the boulder of negative thought, which he had brought with him from his former master’s house. Its surface now was smeared with bloody fingerprints and flecked here and there with some small morsel of cerebral matter, but it was otherwise unchanged. Its solidity, its mass, its blunt, asymmetrical shape: these things were reassuring to the boy, and in due course, negative thought brought enlightenment, just as he had known it would.

On the fifteenth day, he did not preach, but waited in a dusky corner of the Jidur and watched the Durukhar perform without a straight man. He was still good, it had to be said: glib of tongue, expressive of countenance, and alert to the responses of his audience. He had reduced the four virtues of the Durukhar faith to a four-line poem, which he chanted at regular intervals as a mnemonic. By the time the sun fell below the city walls, his voice was hoarse and his alms-bowl was full.

Hakkim followed the Durukhar to his lodgings, a single upstairs room above the Fountain Court. He waited a few minutes after the man had gone inside, and then followed him in. The Durukhar was surprised to see the young adept, but only for a moment. After that, his attention was entirely taken up with the knife that Hakkim had plunged into his chest.

This second killing pleased Hakkim in a way that the first hadn’t. Then, he had been delirious and wild; now, clear-headed and full of reasoned calm. He was therefore able to see how well the act of murder meshed with his chosen and avowed principles. It thinned out the clutter of the world, stilled a distracting voice; the voice, moreover, of an unbeliever, who was standing between others and the light of truth. In every way, it was a devotional act and a thing of beauty.

The Durukhar’s corpse, by contrast, was vile and unpleasant to contemplate: Hakkim cleaned his knife on the man’s sleeve, and withdrew.

This murder proved to be a turning point for the young adept. In the years that followed, Hakkim found the confidence as a public speaker that had formerly eluded him. He preached passionately in the Jidur, and drew large crowds. If some of his hearers remembered the awkward boy who had been the butt of the Durukhar’s jokes, they did not recognize him in the fire-eyed marabout who hectored them now.

Hakkim preached emptiness,
askesis
, the joy of silence and absence and the restraint of desire. In denying mind and body the diversions which they craved, he promised, any man could find within himself the face of God, stripped of all masks; the peace which hides at the heart of
qu’aha sul jidani
.

He believed in that peace, despite the blind, black well of hatred into which his dreams still plunged him more nights than not. Others believed too, and the Ascetics of Bessa became a cult with Hakkim Mehdad as their priest and prophet.

Hakkim’s stern message brought him into conflict with many; he did not flinch from it. Rather, he rejoiced now in the ferocious clash of truth on falsehood, and engaged in hundreds of debates that lasted from sunup to sundown and turned the Jidur into an arena. Mostly he won these duels, and left his opponents lessened. Occasionally he lost, returned after dark, and left them dead.

In his thirtieth year, he took a serious injury in one of these nighttime encounters, when a slick-tongued Re’Ibam prelate fought back somewhat harder than most and turned Hakkim’s knife blade into his own shoulder. This was what decided him to seek, as it were, advanced training in the particular branch of theology which he had made his own.

He took the money he had saved, and the money he had inherited when his master Drihud Ben Din died (of insufficient piety), and he enrolled in the school of assassins.