Alhazred Read online

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  Alhazred © 2006 by Donald Tyson.

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  First e-book edition © 2012

  E-book ISBN: 9780738716275

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  Chapter 1

  The day began like any other. I awoke to the distant cry of a peacock on the lawn of the palace garden, and lay listening to the plash of the marble fountain below my chamber window while one of my slaves brought in a basin of warm water scented with rose petals for me to bathe, and another laid out on the foot of my bed my day robe. Naked beneath the silk sheet, I arched my back and wiggled my toes, unwilling to leave the soft embrace of the down-filled pillows that had molded themselves to my shape.

  My slave Anu stood beside the bed with the steaming copper basin in his hands, a white linen towel draped across his black arm, patiently waiting. He was an Ethiopian, sold into slavery at the age of five years by his father, and was generally held to be the best attendant in the palace, although I had my eye on a man who presently served the king’s bedchamber. Anu was a trifle too silent and serious for my taste. I needed attendants who could appreciate my wit when it burst forth spontaneously at odd times. Then my remarks would be repeated and would find their way into the harem, and my reputation among the wives and concubines of the king would grow, and eventually the praise would reach his ears.

  “Stop staring at me and put the basin down. Your arms are beginning to shake.”

  Wordlessly, Anu set the basin on the marble tiles of the floor beside the bed and stood with arms folded across his massive chest. His dark eyes were upon me, yet unfocused, as though he stared into the distance at some unseen vision. He often did that to irritate me. With a deep sigh, I slid the sheet off my limbs and pushed myself to my feet in front of the window. The cool morning breeze made my skin tingle. My manhood stood in a rampant condition, something that often occurred in the morning. The other slave, a boy from the Lebanon with the absurd name of Dodee, ran to get the glazed chamber pot and held it under my prick. I always felt the need to urinate after rising, having invariably drunk wine just before going to bed the night before.

  “I’m too stiff to piss, Dodee. Wait a few moments.”

  Dodee smiled in his half-witted way, prepared to wait all morning and into the afternoon if necessary. At least he was affable, which made me like him better than distant Anu, who paid no attention to my magnificent display of manhood, though he must have noticed from the corner of his eye. I was proud of the size of my prick. Several women of the palace, including the youngest wife of the king, had assured me that it was uncommonly huge for a man of my height. I wondered if I were larger than Anu. My head only came up to his chin, and his shining black arm where it projected from the short sleeve of his unbleached cotton tunic was thicker than my calf, but these were not always true indicators of manhood.

  Staring at my prick as though it were a rearing cobra, Dodee grinned and revealed his blackened teeth. He was my own age, nineteen years, with barely a fuzz of hairs beginning to sprout from his narrow chin, but he had a passion for sweets that rotted his teeth and caused his breath to stink.

  “A minute more, Dodee.”

  Just before waking, the princess Narisa had held me tight in her embrace and whispered honeyed words into my ear, tickling its depths with the pink tip of her tongue and catching the lobe playfully between her teeth. The dream was still with me. I stared up at the intricate interlocking pattern of colored tiles on the ceiling, thinking of a theorem of geometry from Euclid, and soon my piss began to tinkle into the chamber pot. Dodee carried his prize away.

  My arms spread slightly, I allowed Anu to wash my entire body with a linen cloth that floated in the basin and pat my white skin dry on the fluffy cotton towel. It was our daily ritual together. He worked with speed and efficiency.

  The intricately carved sandalwood screens that shuttered the window had been thrown open, as they always were at first light. My gaze wandered unobstructed down to the splashing fountain in the garden below, formed in the shape of two dancing marble dolphins with thin jets of water erupting from their opened mouths. Clusters of red roses grew all around the circular base of the fountain. Already, a slave assigned to maintain the palace grounds was watering the flowers with a wooden water bucket, while another slave pulled a reservoir behind him on a small cart. Periodically the second slave dipped a pitcher into the reservoir and poured water into the bucket, from which it streamed out through countless holes drilled in its bottom. One day without water and the flowers would wilt; in three days they would die. The same sun that shone down its rays into the walled garden of the king raised dust devils and shimmering mirages on the sands of the desert only an hour away at the walking pace of a horse.

  Amid the green lawns and spreading shade trees of the garden, the desert was no more than a distant illusion, yet seven years before, when first brought to the palace of King Huban by my father, the richness and diversity of forms in the palace had seemed a waking dream or a mad fantasy created by the spell of a djinn. My father was a herder of goats, his house a one-room hovel with mud-plastered walls and a roof of crooked sticks. In those days, dimmed by the passage of time but never to be forgotten, my bed had been a few discarded sacks on the hard clay floor, riddled with lice and fleas. I could never stop scratching my scalp, no matter how many times my mother hit me on the crown of my head with her knuckle. Her knuckle grew callused through overuse and made a dry sound as it struck my skull, like a walnut thrown into an empty wooden bowl.

  My life would have settled into a predictable routine of nit picking and goat herding, indistinguishable from the lives of my father and his father before him, but through some caprice of fate I was gifted at birth with a talent for poetry and the voice of an angel. My early spontaneous songs aroused the wonder of our village. In my twelfth year, my father and I were summoned to audience with King Huban ibn Abd Allah of Yemen at his palace in Sana’a. He had heard the fame of my poetry and wished to learn if it was more than the idle gossip of a small village.

  Strangely, I felt no fear when I stood barefoot in my patched shirt and newly scrubbed face to sing my poetry for th
e king. I never feel nervous when I recite or sing. A deep calmness comes over my soul, and I seem to rise out of myself and listen as though to the performance of some admirable stranger. The philosophers of the Greeks held that all poetry descends from the gods, or as we would phrase it in our more enlightened times, now that the Prophet has lifted our race out of barbarism, from the one God through the mediation of his angels.

  So charmed were the king and his advisors by my song, he entered into agreement with my father that I should remain and live within the palace, to be instructed by the tutors who taught his eldest son, the crown prince Yanni. With these few words, my life changed. My vermin-infested sleeping sacks were handed on to my less fortunate brothers and sisters, who no doubt gave thanks for the additional space created in the cramped little house by my absence. I was forced to become accustomed to sleep beneath sheets of milk-colored silk trimmed with arabesques of golden thread and on pillows filled with the down of swans.

  “Has the Princess Narisa arisen?” I asked without turning to look at Anu, who rubbed the towel down my back and buttocks.

  “I do not know, lord.” His voice was so deep it held the rumble of distant thunder. It grated on my teeth each time he spoke.

  “You have not forgotten my instruction to watch for her each morning?”

  “I remember, lord. I have not seen the princess today.”

  With a shrug, I left him and went to Dodee, who knelt with my white cotton surwal held open between his hands so that I could step into it. He pulled it up my legs and tied the drawstring at my waist. It was of Persian design, baggy but gathered at the cuffs just below the knees, and tastefully embroidered along the seams in rust-colored woolen thread with alternating leaves and flowers. Dodee lifted my thawb from the bed and held it high in his outstretched arms so that I could slip it over my head and shoulders. Of late I had adopted the robe of a scholar, a plain thawb of white silk with long sleeves and a hem that touched the ground, unadorned save for a few filigrees of gold thread worked with black seed pearls about the neck and tiraz bands around the sleeves.

  The Arabic script on the tiraz bands carried the words “In the name of God, the compassionate, blessing from God and mercy upon the Caliph, Yazid ibn Muawya, slave of God, the prince of believers.” I cared nothing either for God or the Caliph, but a pious verse on the tiraz bands lends a young man a modest appearance. The recent austerity of my clothing was the talk of the palace, which amused me greatly. In the harem, whispers spread that I meant to become a philosopher and forsake women altogether. This rumor served my purpose, since of late my attention was devoted to Narisa, and I had neither the energy nor inclination to lie with the slatterns who had polluted my bed in the past.

  Besides, it would injure the feelings of the princess were I to be unfaithful. I had sworn to her that we would be wed, and meant to broach this delicate subject with the king at the first opportunity. Even though my blood was common, the king could easily have me adopted into a noble family, which would render me fit for marriage to his eldest daughter. He had a great fondness for me and treated me in all things as though I were his own son. How to approach the subject of my marriage with the princess, I was uncertain. The question played through my mind each morning with no satisfactory conclusion. There would be only one chance to win the approval of the king, and if he denied the match, he would be alerted to my interest in his daughter and would have my movements watched.­­­

  Our midnight meetings in the arbor beside the dolphin fountain would cease. To know the soft surrender of her parted thighs, gleaming like polished ivory in the moonlight, the palpitations of her heart beneath her breast, her warmly panted kisses, the bite of her nails into my back as she clutched me closer in the height of passion, and then to be driven apart from her and forced to pretend that I felt nothing when I looked at her—it would be more than I could endure, and would surely lead to some hasty and ill-conceived action that would end my life. The word of the king was law, and once spoken could not be revoked.

  Dodee drew yellow leather stockings over my bare feet and tied them above my calves, then slipped my feet into Persian slippers of dark blue felt. The toes were in the latest fashion from Baghdad and narrowed to upturned ends almost as sharp as the point of a dagger. Their tops were decorated with flowers of green and red glass beads. In my opinion, one of the blessings of the Sassanian rule of Yemen had been the introduction of Persian clothing, so much more colorful and graceful than the mundane garments of this land. The armies of Mohammed conquered the Sassanian Empire some ten years before I was born, but it was still possible to buy Persian styles, even though they were frowned upon by disapproving mullahs.

  Without prompting, Dodee held up an oval mirror of polished silver in a black ebony frame. My beardless face was undoubtedly handsome in a boyish way, my changeable gray-green eyes mysterious and penetrating, my nose narrow like the beak of a hawk, my full lower lip tinged with pink. Though my father was dark of complexion, some freak of nature had given me a pale skin that resisted browning beneath the sun. There was a rumor in my village, never spoken before the face of my father, that my mother had lain with a djinn on her journey to the village to be wed, and that I was the spawn of an evil spirit of the desert. The intense devotion of my mother to the teachings of the Koran refuted this slander, yet each time I gazed at my pale skin, the fable returned to my thoughts.

  For a moment I debated whether I should renew the black lines of kohl around the rims of my eyelids, then decided that they would serve until tomorrow. I abhorred vanity. My dark hair was beginning to curl over my ears. I reminded myself to have Anu summon the royal barber some afternoon later in the week, when I was bored and could find no more interesting occupation. Two women of the palace had expressed the desire to possess locks of my hair, which they intended to enclose in silver and crystal pendants, and I saw no harm in gratifying this whim.

  It was not my custom to eat in the morning. I wandered into the adjoining room that held my books and sat at my desk to finish writing the letter I had begun the previous night by lamplight, before the wine made me sleepy. It was addressed to a book merchant at Damascus. He had written describing a new addition to his wares that might interest me, and I intended to include payment in gold with this letter so that the book would be sent to Sana’a on the next caravan east. The work was a rare Greek text on necromancy, difficult to obtain here in Yemen since such books were forbidden to be read or possessed on pain of death. It was fortunate that no mullah would dare to apply these laws to a chosen favorite of the king, since many books of a similar type lined the shelves of my writing room.

  Sealing the letter in wax with my carnelian seal ring, I entrusted it to Anu, who bore it silently from my chambers to place with the rest of the royal mail. I took a black leather volume from a shelf and carried it under my arm down the stairs and out into the garden, meaning to sit in the bower by the fountain and read until Narisa came forth to make her morning circuit of the lawns, with her ever-present maids trailing their dark veils behind her. It would not have been decorous for her to stop and speak with me, but she would glance across at the bower as she passed, and if she saw that my legs were crossed, it was a signal that she should steal from her sleeping chamber that night and come to the bower, where I would be waiting to make love. Today my legs would be crossed.

  The polished marble seat of the bower, shaded from the rising sun by the leaves of the over-arching vines, felt cool against my back and thighs through the silk of my thawb. I opened the black cover of the book and began to read with some difficulty the crabbed Hebrew characters, so inelegant when compared with our own flowing script. In six months, I promised myself, I would read Hebrew as easily as I read Greek. Hebrew was rich in magical texts, and no serious student of the arcane arts could afford to be ignorant of its meaning.

  “Necromancer! Come out into the sun. You’re as white as a frog’s belly.”

&
nbsp; My displeasure did not reveal itself as I closed the book upon my index finger and looked up at Prince Yanni’s plump insolent face. He stood at the entrance to the bower, arms raised to the arch of the trellis that supported the vines.

  “You know the rays of the sun have no effect on my skin.”

  “Then come out and let me put some color in your cheeks. I want to wrestle.”

  Yanni was two years older, and had always been bigger and stronger. He enjoyed wrestling with me because he invariably won.

  “The last time we wrestled you broke the bone of my arm.”

  “Bruised. The physician said the bone was merely bruised, not broken. You always exaggerate, Abdul.”

  He would not go away until he got what he wanted. The look in his eyes said that he wanted to humiliate me by throwing me to the grass and holding me there until I could not breathe and lost consciousness. No one defied the wishes of the crown prince, not even the court poet.

  Closing the book and setting it on the stone bench, I walked to an open patch of sunlit grass, far enough away from the path of pink gravel that Yanni would have difficulty throwing me onto the stones. He followed with a swagger in his step, anticipating the pleasure of his victory. We stripped off our clothing. Yanni took off his jeweled rings and gold neck chains. His paunch was larger than the last time I had viewed it under a similar circumstance. It pleased me to note that his prick, so much more diminutive than my own, was nearly hidden beneath the bulk of his belly.

  He shook his head at my thawb, lying discarded on the grass, while I bent to pull off my leather stockings.

  “Why do you dress like a Persian?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I murmured in irritation as I freed myself from my surwal and dropped it on the grass.

  “You wear nothing on your head. You shave your beard. You wear silk that trails across the ground. All these things are expressly forbidden by the Prophet, upon him peace.”