VI
Return to Jahilia
When Baal the poet saw a single teardrop the colour of blood emerging from the corner of the left eye of the statue of Al-Lat in the House of the Black Stone, he understood that the Prophet Mahound was on his way back to Jahilia after an exile of a quarter- century. He belched violently -- an affliction of age, this, its coarseness seeming to correspond to the general thickening induced by the years, a thickening of the tongue as well as the body, a slow congealment of the blood, that had turned Baal at fifty into a figure quite unlike his quick young self. Sometimes he felt that the air itself had thickened, resisting him, so that even a shortish walk could leave him panting, with an ache in his arm and an irregularity in his chest . . . and Mahound must have
changed, too, returning as he was in splendour and omnipotence to the place whence he fled emptyhanded, without so much as a wife. Mahound at sixty-five. Our names meet, separate, and meet again, Baal thought, but the people going by the names do not remain the same. He left AlLat to emerge into bright sunlight, and heard from behind his back a little snickering laugh. He turned, weightily; nobody to be seen. The hem of a robe vanishing around a corner. These days, down-at-- heel Baal often made strangers giggle in the street. "Bastard!" he shouted at the top of his voice, scandalizing the other worshippers in the House. Baal, the decrepit poet, behaving badly again. He shrugged and headed for home.The city of Jahilia was no longer built of sand. That is to say, the passage of the years, the sorcery of the desert winds, the petrifying moon, the forgetfulness of the people and the inevitability of progress had hardened the town, so that it had lost its old, shifting, provisional quality of a mirage in which men could live, and become a prosaic place, quotidian and (like its poets) poor. Mahound's arm had grown long; his power had encircled Jahilia, cutting off its life--blood, its pilgrims and caravans. The fairs of Jahilia, these days, were pitiful to behold.
Even the Grandee himself had acquired a theadbare look, his white hair as full of gaps as his teeth. His concubines were dying of old age, and he lacked the energy -- or, so the rumours murmured in the desultory alleys of the city, the need -- to replace them. Some days he forgot to shave, which addedto his look of dilapidation and defeat. Only Hind was the same as ever.
She had always had something of a reputation as a witch, who could wish illnesses upon you if you failed to bow down before her litter as it passed, an occultist with the power of transforming men into desert snakes when she had had her fill of them, and then catching them by the tail and having them
cooked in their skins for her evening meal. Now that she had reached sixty the legend of her necromancy was being given new substantiation by her extraordinary and unnatural failure to age. While all around her hardened into stagnation, while the old gangs of Sharks grew middle--aged and squatted on Street corners playing cards and rolling dice, while the old knot--witches and contortionists starved to death in the gullies, while a generation grew up whose conservatism and unquestioning worship of the material world was born of their knowledge of the probability of unemployment and penury, while the great city lost its sense of itself and even the
cult of the dead declined in popularity to the relief of
the camels of Jahilia, whose dislike of being left with severed hamstrings on human graves was easy to comprehend .. . while Jahilia decayed, in short, Hind remained unwrinkled, her body as firm as any young woman's, her hair as black as crow feathers, hereyes sparkling like knives, her bearing still haughty, her voice still brooking no opposition. Hind, not Simbel, ruled the city now; or so she undeniably believed.
As the Grandee grew into a soft and pursy old age, Hind took to writing a series of admonitory and hortatory epistles or bulls to the people of the city. These were pasted up on every street in town. So it was that Hind and not Abu Simbel came to be thought of by Jahilians as the embodiment of the city, its living avatar, because they found in her physical unchangingness and in the unflinching resolve of her proclamations a description of themselves far more palatable than the picture they saw in the mirror of Simbel's crumbling face. Hind's posters were more influential than any poet's verses. She was still sexually voracious, and had slept with every writer in the city (though it was a
long time since Baal had been allowed into her bed); now the writers were used up, discarded, and she was rampant. With sword as well as pen. She was Hind, who had joined the Jahilian army disguised as
a man, using sorcery to deflect all spears and
swords, seeking out her brothers' killer through the storm of war. Hind, who butchered the Prophet's uncle, and ate old Hamza's liver and his heart.Who could resist her? For her eternal youth which was also theirs; for her ferocity which gave them the illusion of being invincible; and for her bulls, which were refusals of time, of history, of age, which sang the city's undimmed magnificence and defied the garbage and decrepitude of the streets, which insisted on greatness, on leadership, on immortality, on the status of Jahilians as custodians of the divine
. . . for these writings the people forgave her her promiscuity, they turned a blind eye to the stories of Hind being weighed in emeralds on her birthday, they ignored rumours of orgies, they laughed when told of the size of her wardrobe, of the five hundred and eighty-one nightgowns made of gold leaf and
the four hundred and twenty pairs of ruby slippers. The citizens of Jahilia dragged themselves through their increasingly dangerous streets, in which murder for small change was becoming
commonplace, in which old women were being raped and ritually slaughtered, in which the riots of the starving were brutally put down by Hind's personal police force, the Manticorps; and in spite of the evidence of their eyes, stomachs and wallets, they believed what Hind whispered in their ears: Rule, Jahilia, glory of the world.
Not all of them, of course. Not, for example, Baal. Who looked away from public affairs and wrote poems of unrequited love.Munching a white radish, he arrived home, passing beneath a dingy archway in a cracking wall. Here there was a small urinous courtyard littered with feathers, vegetable peelings, blood. There was no sign of human life: only flies, shadows, fear. These days it was necessary to be on one's guard. A sect of murderous hashashin roamed the city. Affluent persons were advised to approach their homes on the opposite side of the street, to make sure that the house was not being watched; when the coast was clear they would rush for the door and shut it behind them before any lurking criminal could push his way in. Baal did not bother with such precautions. Once he had been affluent, but that was a quarter of a century ago. Now there was no demand for satires -- the general fear of Mahound had destroyed the market for insults and wit. And with the decline of the cult of the dead had come a
sharp drop in orders for epitaphs and triumphal odes of revenge. Times were hard all around.
Dreaming of long-lost banquets, Baal climbed an unsteady wooden staircase to his small upstairs room. What did he have to steal? He wasn't worth the knife. Opening his door, he began to enter,
when a push sent him tumbling to bloody his nose against the far wall. "Don't kill me," he squealed blindly. "O God, don't murder me, for pity's sake, O."The other hand closed the door. Baal knew that no matter how loudly he screamed they would remain alone, sealed off from the world in that uncaring room. Nobody would come; he himself, hearing his neighbour shriek, would have pushed his cot against the door.
The intruder's hooded cloak concealed his face completely. Baal mopped his bleeding nose, kneeling, shaking uncontrollably. "I've got no money," he implored. "I've got nothing." Now the stranger spoke: "If a hungry dog looks for food, he does not look in the doghouse." And then, after a pause: "Baal. There's not much left of you. I had hoped for more."
Now Baal felt oddly affronted as well as terrified. Was this some kind of demented fan, who would kill him because he no longer lived up to the power of his old work? Still trembling, he attempted self-- deprecation. "To meet a writer is, usually, to be disappointed," he offered. The other ignored this remark. "Mahound is coming," he said.
This flat statement filled Baal with the most
profound terror. "What's that got to do with me?" he cried. "What does he want? It was a long time ago -- a lifetime -- more than a lifetime. What does he want? Are you from, are you sent by him?""His memory is as long as his face," the intruder said, pushing back his hood. "No, I am not his messenger. You and I have something in common. We are both afraid of him."
"I know you," Baal said. "Yes."
"The way you speak. You're a foreigner."
"'A revolution of water--carriers, immigrants and slaves,'" the stranger quoted. "Your words."
"You're the immigrant," Baal remembered. "The Persian. Sulaiman." The Persian smiled his crooked smile. "Salman," he corrected. "Not wise, but peaceful."
"You were one of the closest to him," Baal said, perplexed.
"The closer you are to a conjurer," Salman bitterly replied, "the easier to spot the trick."
And Gibreel dreamed this:
At the oasis of Yathrib the followers of the new faith of Submission found themselves landless, and therefore poor. For many years they financed themselves by acts of brigandage, attacking the rich camel-trains on their way to and from Jahilia. Mahound had no time for scruples, Salman toldBaal, no qualms about ends and means. The faithful lived by lawlessness, but in those years Mahound -- or should one say the Archangel Gibreel? -- should one say Al-Lah? -- became obsessed by law. Amid the palm-trees of the oasis Gibreel appeared to the Prophet and found himself spouting rules, rules, rules, until the faithful could scarcely bear the prospect of any more revelation, Salman said, rules about every damn thing, if a man farts let him turn his face to the wind, a rule about which hand to use for the purpose of cleaning one's behind. It was as if no aspect of human existence was to be left
unregulated, free. The revelation -- the _recitation_ -
- told the faithful how much to eat, how deeply they should sleep, and which sexual positions had received divine sanction, so that they learned that sodomy and the missionary position were approved of by the archangel, whereas the forbidden postures included all those in which the female was on top. Gibreel further listed the permitted and forbidden subjects of conversation, and earmarked the parts
of the body which could not be scratched no matter
how unbearably they might itch. He vetoed the consumption of prawns, those bizarre other-worldly creatures which no member of the faithful had ever seen, and required animals to be killed slowly, by bleeding, so that by experiencing their deaths to the full they might arrive at an understanding of the meaning of their lives, for it is only at the momentof death that living creatures understand that life has been real, and not a sort of dream. And Gibreel the archangel specified the manner in which a man should be buried, and how his property should be divided, so that Salman the Persian got to wondering what manner of God this was that sounded so much like a businessman. This was when he had the idea that destroyed his faith, because he recalled that of course Mahound himself had been a businessman, and a damned successful one at that, a person to whom organization and
rules came naturally, so how excessively convenient it was that he should have come up with such a very businesslike archangel, who handed down the management decisions of this highly corporate, if
non-corporeal, God.
After that Salman began to notice how useful and well timed the angel's revelations tended to be, so that when the faithful were disputing Mahound's views on any subject, from the possibility of space travel to the permanence of Hell, the angel would
turn up with an answer, and he always supported Mahound, stating beyond any shadow of a doubt that it was impossible that a man should ever walk upon the moon, and being equally positive on thetransient nature of damnation: even the most evil of doers would eventually be cleansed by hellfire and find their way into the perfumed gardens, Gulistan and Bostan. It would have been different, Salman complained to Baal, if Mahound took up his positions after receiving the revelation from Gibreel; but no, he just laid down the law and the angel would confirm it afterwards; so I began to get a bad smell in my nose, and I thought, this must be the odour of those fabled and legendary unclean creatures,
what's their name, prawns.
The fishy smell began to obsess Salman, who was the most highly educated of Mahound's intimates owing to the superior educational system then on offer in Persia. On account of his scholastic advancement Salman was made Mahound's official scribe, so that it fell to him to write down the endlessly proliferating rules. All those revelations of convenience, he told Baal, and the longer I did the job the worse it got. -- For a time, however, his suspicions had to be shelved, because the armies of Jahilia marched on Yathrib, determined to swat the flies who were pestering their camel--trains and interfering with business. What followed is well
known, no need for me to repeat, Salman said, but then his immodesty burst out of him and forced him to tell Baal how he personally had saved Yathrib from certain destruction, how he had preservedMahound's neck with his idea of a ditch. Salman had persuaded the Prophet to have a huge trench dug all the way around the unwalled oasis settlement, making it too wide even for the fabled Arab horses
of the famous Jahilian cavalry to leap across. A ditch: with sharpened stakes at the bottom. When the Jahilians saw this foul piece of unsportsmanlike hole-digging their sense of chivalry and honour obliged them to behave as if the ditch had not been dug, and to ride their horses at it, full--tilt. The flower of Jahilia's army, human as well as equine, ended up impaled on the pointed sticks of Salman's Persian deviousness, trust an immigrant not to play the game. -- And after the defeat of Jahilia? Salman lamented to Baal: You'd have thought I'd have been a hero, I'm not a vain man but where were the public honours, where was the gratitude of
Mahound, why didn't the archangel mention _me_ in despatches? Nothing, not a syllable, it was as if the faithful thought of my ditch as a cheap trick, too, an outlandish thing, dishonouring, unfair; as if their manhood had been damaged by the thing, as
though I'd hurt their pride by saving their skins. I kept my mouth shut and said nothing, but I lost a lot of friends after that, I can tell you, people hate
you to do them a good turn.In spite of thc ditch of Yathrib, the faithful lost a good many men in the war against Jahilia. On their raiding sorties they lost as many lives as they claimed. And after the end of the war, hey presto, there was the Archangel Gibreel instructing the surviving males to marry the widowed women, lest by remarrying outside the faith they be lost to Submission. Oh, such a practical angel, Salman sneered to Baal. By now he had produced a bottle of toddy from the folds of his cloak and the two men were drinking steadily in the failing light. Salman grew ever more garrulous as the yellow liquid in the bottle went down; Baal couldn't recall when he'd last heard anyone talk up such a storm. O, those matter-
-of--fact revelations, Salman cried, we were even told it didn't matter if we were already married, we could have up to four marriages if we could afford it, well, you can imagine, the lads really went for that.
What finally finished Salman with Mahound: the question of the women; and of the Satanic verses. Listen, I'm no gossip, Salman drunkenly confided, but after his wife's death Mahound was no angel, you understand my meaning. But in Yathrib he almost met his match. Those women up there: they turned his beard half-white in a year. The point about our Prophet, my dear Baal, is that he didn't
like his women to answer back, he went for mothers and daughters, think of his first wife and then Ayesha: too old and too young, his two loves. He didn't like to pick on someone his own size. But in Yathrib the women are different, you don't know, here injahilia you're used to ordering your females about but up there they won't put up with it. When a man gets married he goes to live with his wife's people! Imagine! Shocking, isn't it? And throughout the marriage the wife keeps her own tent. If she wants to get rid of her husband she turns the tent round to face in the opposite direction, so that when he comes to her he finds fabric where the door should be, and that's that, he's out, divorced, not a thing he can do about it. Well, our girls were beginning to go for that type of thing, getting who knows what sort of ideas in their heads, so at once, bang, out comes the rule book, the angel starts pouring out rules about what women mustn't do, he starts forcing them back into the docile attitudes the Prophet prefers, docile or maternal, walking three steps behind or sitting at home being wise and waxing their chins. How the women of Yathrib laughed at the faithful, I swear, but that man is a magician, nobody could resist his charm; the faithful women did as he ordered them. They Submitted: he was offering them Paradise, after all."Anyway," Salman said near the bottom of the
bottle, "finally I decided to test him."One night the Persian scribe had a dream in which he was hovering above the figure of Mahound at the Prophet's cave on Mount Cone. At first Salman took this to be no more than a nostalgic reverie of the old days in Jahilia, but then it struck him that his point
of view, in the dream, had been that of the archangel, and at that moment the memory of the incident of the Satanic verses came back to him as vividly as if the thing had happened the previous day. "Maybe I hadn't dreamed of myself as Gibreel," Salman recounted. "Maybe I was Shaitan." The realization of this possibility gave him his diabolic idea. After that, when he sat at the Prophet's feet, writing down rules rules rules, he began, surreptitiously, to change things.
"Little things at first. If Mahound recited a verse in which God was described as _all-hearing, all- knowing_, I would write, _all-knowing, all-wise_. Here's the point: Mahound did not notice the alterations. So there I was, actually writing the Book, or rewriting, anyway, polluting the word of God with my own profane language. But, good heavens, if my poor words could not be distinguished from the Revelation by God's own Messenger, then what did that mean? What did that say about the quality of the divine poetry? Look, I
swear, I was shaken to my soul. It's one thing to be a smart bastard and have half--suspicions about funny business, but it's quite another thing to find out that you're right. Listen: I changed my life for that man. I left my country, crossed the world, settled among people who thought me a slimy foreign coward for saving their, who never appreciated what I, but never mind that. The truthis that what! expected when I made that first tiny change, _all-wise_ instead of _all-hearing_ -- what I
_wanted_ --was to read it back to the Prophet, and he'd say, What's the matter with you, Salman, arc you going deaf? And I'd say, Oops, O God, bit of a slip, how could I, and correct myself. But it didn't happen; and now I was writing the Revelation and nobody was noticing, and I didn't have the courage to own up. I was scared silly, I can tell you. Also: I was sadder than I have ever been. So I had to go on doing it. Maybe he'd just missed out once, I
thought, anybody can make a mistake. So the next time I changed a bigger thing. He said _Christian_, I wrote down _Jew_. He'd notice that, surely; how could he not? But when I read him the chapter he nodded and thanked me politely, and I went out of his tent with tears in my eyes. After that I knew my days in Yathrib were numbered; but I had to go on doing it. I had to. There is no bitterness like that of
a man who finds out he has been believing in a ghost. I would fall, I knew, but he would fall with
me. So I went on with my devilment, changing verses, until one day I read my lines to him and saw him frown and shake his head as if to clear his mind, and then nod his approval slowly, but with a little doubt. I knew I'd reached the edge, and that the next time I rewrote the Book he'd know everything. That night I lay awake, holding his fate in my hands as well as my own. If I allowed myself to be destroyed I could destroy him, too. I had to choose, on that awful night, whether I preferred death with revenge to life without anything. As you see, Ichose: life. Before dawn I left Yathrib on my camel, and made my way, suffering numerous misadventures I shall not trouble to relate, back tojahilia. And now Mahound is coming in triumph; so I shall lose my life after all. And his power has
grown too great for me to unmake him now."
Baal asked: "Why are you sure he will kill you?" Salman the Persian answered: "It's his Word against
mine."
o o o
When Salman had slipped into unconsciousness on the floor, Baal lay on his scratchy straw--filled mattress, feeling the steel ring of pain around his forehead, the flutter of warning in his heart. Often his tiredness with his life had made him wish not to
grow old, but, as Salman had said, to dream of a thing is very different from being faced with the fact of it. For some time now he had been conscious that the world was closing in around him. He could no longer pretend that his eyes were what they oughtto be, and their dimness made his life even more shadowy, harder to grasp. All this blurring and loss of detail: no wonder his poetry had gone down the drain. His ears were getting to be unreliable, too. At this rate he'd soon end up sealed off from
everything by the loss of his senses. . . but maybe he'd never get the chance. Mahound was coming. Maybe he would never kiss another woman. Mahound, Mahound. Why has this chatterbox drunk come to me, he thought angrily. What do I have to do with his treachery? Everyone knows why I wrote those satires years ago; he must know. How the Grandee threatened and bullied. I can't be held responsible. And anyway: who is he, that prancing sneering boy-wonder, Baal of the cutting tongue? I don't recognize him. Look at me: heavy, dull, nearsighted, soon to be deaf. Who do I threaten? Not a soul. He began to shake Salman: wake up, I don't want to be associated with you, you'll get me into trouble.
The Persian snored on, sitting splay-legged on the floor with his back to the wall, his head hanging sideways like a doll"s; Baa!, racked by headache,
fell back on to his cot. His verses, he thought, what had they been? _What kind of idea_ damn it, he couldn't even remember them properly _does Submission seem today_ yes, something like that, after all this time it was scarcely surprising _an idea that runs away_ that was the end anyhow. Mahound, any new idea is asked two questions. When it's weak: will it compromise? We know the answer to that one. And now, Mahound, on your return to Jahilia, time for the second question: How do you behave when you win? When your enemies are at your mercy and your power has become absolute: what then? We have all changed: all of us except Hind. Who seems, from what this drunkard says, more like a woman of Yathrib than Jahilia. No wonder the two of you didn't hit it off: she wouldn't be your mother or your child.As he drifted towards sleep, Baa! surveyed his own uselessness, his failed art. Now that he had abdicated all public platforms, his verses were full of loss: of youth, beauty, love, health, innocence, purpose, energy, certainty, hope. Loss of
knowledge. Loss of money. The loss of Hind. Figures walked away from him in his odes, and the more passionately he called out to them the faster they moved. The landscape of his poetry was still the desert, the shifting dunes with the plumes of white sand blowing from their peaks. Soft mountains,
uncompleted journeys, the impermanence of tents. How did one map a country that blew into a new form every day? Such questions made his language too abstract, his imagery too fluid, his metre too inconstant. It led him to create chimeras of form, lionheaded goatbodied serpenttailed impossibilities whose shapes felt obliged to change the moment they were set, so that the demotic forced its way into lines of classical purity and images of love were constantly degraded by the intrusion of elements of farce. Nobody goes for that stuff, he thought for the thousand and first time, and as unconsciousness arrived he concluded, comfortingly: Nobody remembers me. Oblivion is safety. Then his heart missed a beat and he came wide awake, frightened, cold. Mahound, maybe I'll cheat you of your revenge. He spent the night awake, listening to Salman's rolling, oceanic snores.Gibreel dreamed campfires:
A famous and unexpected figure walks, one night, between the campfires of Mahound's army. Perhaps on account of the dark, -- or it might be because of the improbability of his presence here, -- it seems that the Grandee of Jahilia has regained, in this final moment of his power, some of the strength of his earlier days. He has come alone; and is led by
Khalid the erstwhile water--carrier and the former
slave Bilal to the quarters of Mahound.Next, Gibreel dreamed the Grandee's return home: The town is full of rumours and there's a crowd in
front of the house. After a time the sound of Hind's voice lifted in rage can be clearly heard. Then at an upper balcony Hind shows herself and demands that the crowd tear her husband into small pieces. The Grandee appears beside her; and receives loud, humiliating smacks on both cheeks from his loving wife. Hind has discovered that in spite of all her efforts she has not been able to prevent the
Grandee from surrendering the city to Mahound.
Moreover: Abu Simbel has embraced the faith. Simbel in his defeat has lost much of his recent
wispiness. He permits Hind to strike him, and then speaks calmly to the crowd. He says: Mahound has promised that anyone within the Grandee's walls will be spared. "So come in, all of you, and bring your families, too."
Hind speaks for the angry crowd. "You old fool. How many citizens can fit inside a single house, even this one? You've done a deal to save your own neck. Let them rip you up and feed you to the ants."
Still the Grandee is mild. "Mahound also promises
that all who are found at home, behind closed doors, will be safe. If you will not come into my home then go to your own; and wait."A third time his wife attempts to turn the crowd against him; this is a balcony scene of hatred instead of love. There can be no compromise with Mahound, she shouts, he is not to be trusted, the people must repudiate Abu Simbel and prepare to fight to the last man, the last woman. She herself is prepared to fight beside them and die for the freedom of Jahilia. "Will you merely lie down before this false prophet, this Dajjal? Can honour be expected of a man who is preparing to storm the
city of his birth? Can compromise be hoped for from the uncompromising, pity from the pitiless? We are the mighty of Jahilia, and our goddesses, glorious in battle, will prevail." She commands them to fight in the name of Al-Lat. But the people begin to leave.
Husband and wife stand on their balcony, and the people see them plain. For so long the city has used these two as its mirrors; and because, of late, Jahilians have preferred Hind's images to the greying Grandee, they are suffering, now, from profound shock. A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of
sleep, or madness. Now the Grandee has awakened them from that sleep; they stand disoriented, rubbing their eyes, unable to believe at first -- if we are so mighty, how then have we fallen so fast, so utterly? -- and then belief comes, and shows them how their confidence has been built on clouds, on the passion of Hind's proclamations and on very little else. They abandon her, and with her, hope. Plunging into despair, the people of Jahilia go home to lock their doors.She screams at them, pleads, loosens her hair. "Come to the House of the Black Stone! Come and make sacrifice to Lat!" But they have gone. And Hind and the Grandee are alone on their balcony,
while throughout Jahilia a great silence falls, a great stillness begins, and Hind leans against the wall of her palace and closes her eyes.
It is the end. The Grandee murmurs softly: "Not many of us have as much reason to be scared of Mahound as you. If you eat a man's favourite uncle's innards, raw, without so much as salt or garlic, don't be surprised if he treats you, in turn, like meat." Then he leaves her, and goes down into the streets from which even the dogs have vanished, to unlock the city gates.
Gibreel dreamed a temple:
By the open gates of Jahilia stood the temple ofUzza. And Mahound spake unto Khalid who had been a carrier of water before, and now bore greater weights: "Go thou and cleanse that place." So Khalid with a force of men descended upon the temple, for Mahound was loth to enter the city while such abominations stood at its gates.
When the guardian of the temple, who was of the tribe of Shark, saw the approach of Khalid with a great host of warriors, he took up his sword and went to the idol of the goddess. After making his final prayers he hung his sword about her neck, saying, "If thou be truly a goddess, Uzza, defend thyself and thy servant against the coming of Mahound." Then Khalid entered the temple, and when the goddess did not move the guardian said, "Now verily do I know that the God of Mahound is the true God, and this stone but a stone." Then
Khalid broke the temple and the idol and returned to Mahound in his tent. And the Prophet asked: "What didst thou see?" Khalid spread his arms. "Nothing," said he. "Then thou hast not destroyed her," the Prophet cried. "Go again, and complete thy work."
So Khalid returned to the fallen temple, and there an enormous woman, all black but for her long scarlet tongue, came running at him, naked from head to foot, her black hair flowing to her ankles from her head. Nearing him, she halted, and recited
in her terrible voice of sulphur and hellfire: "Have you heard of Lat, and Manat, and Uzza, the Third, the Other? They are the Exalted Birds . . ." But Khalid interrupted her, saying, "Uzza, those are the Devil's verses, and you the Devil's daughter, a creature not to be worshipped, but denied." So he drew his sword and cut her down.And he returned to Mahound in his tent and said what he had seen. And the Prophet said, "Now may we come into Jahilia," and they arose, and came into the city, and possessed it in the Name of the Most High, the Destroyer of Men.
o o o
How many idols in the House of the Black Stone? Don't forget: three hundred and sixty. Sun-god, eagle, rainbow. The colossus of Hubal. Three hundred and sixty wait for Mahound, knowing they are not to be spared. And are not: but let's not waste time there. Statues fall; stone breaks; what's to be done is done.
Mahound, after the cleansing of the House, sets up his tent or the old fairground. The people crowd around the tent, embracing the victorious faith. The Submission of Jahilia: this, too, is inevitable, and need not be lingered over.
While Jahilians bow before him, mumbling their life- saving sentences, _there is no God but Al-Lah_, Mahound whispers to Khalid. Somebody has not come to kneel before him; somebody long awaited. "Salman," the Prophet wishes to know. "Has he been found?""Not yet. He's hiding; but it won't be long."
There is a distraction. A veiled woman kneels before him, kissing his feet. "You must stop," he enjoins.
"It is only God who must be worshipped." But what foot-kissery this is! Toe by toe, joint by joint, the woman licks, kisses, sucks. And Mahound, unnerved, repeats: "Stop. This is incorrect." Now, however, the woman is attending to the soles of his feet, cupping her hands beneath his heel . . . he kicks out, in his confusion, and catches her in the throat. She falls, coughs, then prostrates herself
before him, and says firmly: "There is no God but Al- Lah, and Mahound is his Prophet." Mahound calms himself, apologizes, extends a hand. "No harm will come to you," he assures her. "All who Submit are spared." But there is a strange confusion in him, and now he understands why, understands the anger,
the bitter irony in her overwhelming, excessive, sensual adoration of his feet. The woman throws off her veil: Hind.
"The wife of Abu Simbel," she announces clearly, and a hush falls. "Hind," Mahound says. "I had not forgotten."But, after a long instant, he nods. "You have
Submitted. And are welcome in my tents."
The next day, amid the continuing conversions, Salman the Persian is dragged into the Prophet's presence. Khalid, holding him by the ear, holding a knife at his throat, brings the immigrant snivelling and whimpering to the takht. "I found him, where else, with a whore, who was screeching at him because he didn't have the money to pay her. He stinks of alcohol."
"Salman Farsi," the Prophet begins to pronounce the sentence of death, but the prisoner begins to shriek the qalmah: "La ilaha ilallah! La ilaha!"
Mahound shakes his head. "Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven. Did you think I wouldn't work it out? To set your words against the Words of God."
Scribe, ditch-digger, condemned man: unable to muster the smallest scrap of dignity, he blubbers whimpers pleads beats his breast abases himself repents. Khalid says: "This noise is unbearable, Messenger. Can I not cut off his head?" At which the
noise increases sharply. Salman swears renewed loyalty, begs some more, and then, with a gleam of desperate hope, makes an offer. "I can show you where your true enemies are." This earns him a few seconds. The Prophet inclines his head. Khalid pulls the kneeling Salman's head back by the hair: "What enemies?" And Salman says a name. Mahound sinks deep into his cushions as memory returns."Baal," he says, and repeats, twice: "Baal, Baal." Much to Khalid's disappointment, Salman the
Persian is not sentenced to death. Bilal intercedes
for him, and the Prophet, his mind elsewhere, concedes: yes, yes, let the wretched fellow live. O generosity of Submission! Hind has been spared;
and Salman; and in all of Jahilia not a door has been smashed down, not an old foe dragged out to have his gizzard slit like a chicken's in the dust. This is Mahound's answer to the second question: _What happens when you win?_ But one name haunts Mahound, leaps around him, young, sharp, pointing
a long painted finger, singing verses whose cruel brilliance ensures their painfulness. That night, when the supplicants have gone, Khalid asks Mahound: "You're still thinking about him?" The Messenger nods, but will not speak. Khalid says: "I made Salman take me to his room, a hovel, but he isn't there, he's hiding out." Again, the nod, but no
speech. Khalid presses on: "You want me to dig him out? Wouldn't take much doing. What d"you want done with him? This? This?" Khalid's finger moves first across his neck and then, with a sharp jab, into his navel. Mahound loses his temper. "You're a fool," he shouts at the former water-carrier who is now his military chief of staff. "Can't you ever work thingsout without my help?"
Khalid bows and goes. Mahound falls asleep: his old gift, his way of dealing with bad moods.
o o o
But Khalid, Mahound's general, could not find Baal. In spite of door--to--door searches, proclamations, turnings of stones, the poet proved impossible to nab. And Mahound's lips remained closed, would not part to allow his wishes to emerge. Finally, and not without irritation, Khalid gave up the search. "Just
let that bastard show his face, just once, any time," he vowed in the Prophet's tent of softnesses and shadows. "I'll slice him so thin you'll be able to see right through each piece."
It seemed to Khalid that Mahound looked disappointed; but in the low light of the tent it was impossible to be sure.
o o o
Jahilia settled down to its new life: the call to prayers five times a day, no alcohol, the locking upof wives. Hind herself retired to her quarters . . . but where was Baal?
Gibreel dreamed a curtain:
The Curtain, _Hijab_, was the name of the most popular brothel in Jahilia, an enormous palazzo of date--palms in water--tinkling courtyards, surrounded by chambers that interlocked in bewildering mosaic patterns, permeated by labyrinthine corridors which had been deliberately decorated to look alike, each of them bearing the same calligraphic invocations to Love, each carpeted with identical rugs, each with a large stone urn positioned against a wall. None of The Curtain's clients could ever find their way, without help, either into the rooms of their favoured courtesan or back again to the street. In this way the girls were protected from unwanted guests and the business ensured payment before departure. Large Circassian
eunuchs, dressed after the ludicrous fashion of lamp-
-genies, escorted the visitors to their goals and back again, sometimes with the help of balls of string. It was a soft windowless universe of draperies, ruled over by the ancient and nameless Madam of the Curtain whose guttural utterances from the secrecy of a chair shrouded in black veils had acquired, over
the years, something of the oracular. Neither her staff nor her clients were able to disobey that sibylline voice that was, in a way, the profane antithesis of Mahound's sacred utterances in a larger, more easily penetrable tent not so very far away. So that when the raddled poet Baal prostrated himself before her and begged for help, her decision to hide him and save his life as an act of nostalgia for the beautiful, lively and wicked youth he had once been was accepted without question; and when Khalid's guards arrived to search the premises the eunuchs led them on a dizzy journey around that overground catacomb of contradictions and irreconcilable routes, until the soldiers' heads were spinning, and after lookinginside thirty-nine stone urns and finding nothing but unguents and pickles they left, cursing heavily, never suspecting that there was a fortieth corridor down which they had never been taken, a fortieth urn inside which there hid, like a thief, the
quivering, pajama-wetting poet whom they sought.
After that the Madam had the eunuchs dye the poet's skin until it was blue-black, and his hair as well, and dressing him in the pantaloons and turban of a djinn she ordered him to begin a body-building course, since his lack of condition would certainly arouse suspicions if he didn't tone up fast.
o o oBaal's sojourn "behind The Curtain" by no means deprived him of information about events outside; quite the reverse, in fact, because in the course of his eunuchly duties he stood guard outside the
pleasure-chambers and heard the customers' gossip. The absolute indiscretion of their tongues, induced
by the gay abandon of the whores' caresses and by the clients' knowledge that their secrets would be kept, gave the eavesdropping poet, myopic and hard of hearing as he was, a better insight into contemporary affairs than he could possibly have gained if he'd still been free to wander the newly puritanical streets of the town. The deafness was a problem sometimes; it meant that there were gaps
in his knowledge, because the customers frequently lowered their voices and whispered; but it also minimized the prurient element in his listenings--in, since he was unable to hear the murmurings that accompanied fornication, except, of course, at such moments in which ecstatic clients or feigning workers raised their voices in cries of real or synthetic joy.
What Baal learned at The Curtain:
From the disgruntled butcher Ibrahim came the news that in spite of the new ban on pork the skin-
deep converts of Jahilia were flocking to his back door to buy the forbidden meat in secret, "sales are up," he murmured while mounting his chosen lady, "black pork prices are high; but damn it, these new rules have made my work eough. A pig is not an easy animal to slaughter in secret, without noise," and thereupon he began some squealing of his own, for reasons, it is to be presumed, of pleasure rather than pain. -- And the grocer, Musa, confessed to another of The Curtain's horizontal staff that the old habits were hard to break, and when he was sure nobody was listening he still said a prayer or two to "my lifelong favourite, Manat, and sometimes, what to do, Al-Lat as well; you can't beat a female goddess, they've got attributes the boys can't match," after which he, too, fell upon the earthly imitations of these attributes with a will. So it was that faded, fading Baal learned in his bitterness that no imperium is absolute, no victory complete. And, slowly, the criticisms of Mahound began.Baal had begun to change. The news of the destruction of the great temple of Al-Lat at Taif, which came to his ears punctuated by the grunts of the covert pig-sticker Ibrahim, had plunged him into a deep sadness, because even in the high days of
his young cynicism his love of the goddess had been genuine, perhaps his only genuine emotion, and her fall revealed to him the hollowness of a life in which
the only true love had been felt for a lump of stone that couldn't fight back. When the first, sharp edge of grief had been dulled, Baal became convincedthat Al-Lat's fall meant that his own end was not far away. He lost that strange sense of safety that life at The Curtain had briefly inspired in him; but the
returning knowledge of his impermanence, of certain discovery followed by equally certain death, did not, interestingly enough, make him afraid. After a lifetime of dedicated cowardice he found to his great surprise that the effect of the approach of death really did enable him to taste the sweetness of life, and he wondered at the paradox of having his eyes opened to such a truth in that house of costly lies. And what was the truth? It was that Al-Lat was dead
-- had never lived -- but that didn't make Mahound a prophet. In sum, Baal had arrived at godlessness. He began, stumblingly, to move beyond the idea of gods and leaders and rules, and to perceive that his story was so mixed up with Mahound's that some great resolution was necessary. That this resolution would in all probability mean his death neither shocked nor bothered him overmuch; and when Musa the grocer grumbled one day about the twelve wives" of the Prophet, _one rule for him, another for
us_, Baal understood the form his final confrontation with Submission would have to take.
The girls of The Curtain -- it was only by convention
that they were referred to as "girls", as the eldest was a woman well into her fifties, while the youngest, at fifteen, was more experienced than many fifty-year-olds -- had grown fond of this shambling Baal, and in point of fact they enjoyed having a eunuch-whowasn't, so that out of working hours they would tease him deliciously, flauntingtheir bodies before him, placing their breasts against his lips, twining their legs around his waist, kissing one another passionately just an inch away from his face, until the ashy writer was hopelessly aroused; whereupon they would laugh at his stiffness and mock him into blushing, quivering detumescence;
or, very occasionally, and when he had given up all expectation of such a thing, they would depute one of their number to satisfy, free of charge, the lust they had awakened. In this way, like a myopic, blinking, tame bull, the poet passed his days, laying his head in women's laps, brooding on death and revenge, unable to say whether he was the most contented or the wretchedest man alive.
It was during one of these playful sessions at the end of a working day, when the girls were alone with their eunuchs and their wine, that Baal heard the youngest talking about her client, the grocer, Musa. "That one!" she said. "He's got a bee in his bonnet about the Prophet's wives. He's so annoyed about them that he gets excited just by mentioning
their names. He tells me that I personally am the spitting image of Ayesha herself, and she's His Nibs's favourite, as all are aware. So there."The fifty-year-old courtesan butted in. "Listen, those women in that harem, the men don't talk about anything else these days. No wonder Mahound secluded them, but it's only made things worse. People fantasize more about what they can't see."
Especially in this town, Baal thought; above all in our Jahilia of the licentious ways, where until Mahound arrived with his rule book the women dressed brightly, and all the talk was of fucking and money, money and sex, and not just the talk, either.
He said to the youngest whore: "Why don't you pretend for him?"
"Who?"
"Musa. If Ayesha gives him such a thrill, why not become his private and personal Ayesha?"
"God," the girl said. "If they heard you say that they'd boil your balls in butter."
How many wives? Twelve, and one old lady, long dead. How many whores behind The Curtain?
Twelve again; and, secret on her black--tented throne, the ancient Madam, still defying death. Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.Baal told the Madam of his idea; she settled matters in her voice of a laryngitic frog. "It is very dangerous," she pronounced, "but it could be damn good for business. We will go carefully; but we will go."
The fifteen-year-old whispered something in the grocer's ear. At once a light began to shine in his eyes. "Tell me everything," he begged. "Your childhood, your favourite toys, Solomon"s-horses
and the rest, tell me how you played the tambourine and the Prophet came to watch." She told him, and then he asked about her deflowering at the age of twelve, and she told him that, and afterwards he
paid double the normal fee, because "it's been the best time of my life". "We'll have to be careful of heart conditions," the Madam said to Baa!.
o o o
When the news got around Jahilia that the whores of The Curtain had each assumed the identity of one of Mahound's wives, the clandestine excitement of the city's males was intense; yet, so afraid were they of discovery, both because they would surely lose their lives if Mahound or his lieutenants ever found out
that they had been involved in such irreverences, and because of their desire that the new service at The Curtain be maintained, that the secret was kept from the authorities. In those days Mahound had returned with his wives to Yathrib, preferring the cool oasis climate of the north to Jahilia's heat. Thecity had been left in the care of General Khalid, from whom things were easily concealed. For a time Mahound had considered telling Khalid to have all
the brothels of Jahilia closed down, but Abu Simbel had advised him against so precipitate an act. "Jahilians are new converts," he pointed out. "Take things slowly." Mahound, most pragmatic of Prophets, had agreed to a period of transition. So, in the Prophet's absence, the men of Jahilia flocked to The Curtain, which experienced a three hundred per cent increase in business. For obvious reasons it was not politic to form a queue in the street, and so on many days a line of men curled around the
innermost courtyard of the brothel, rotating about its centrally positioned Fountain of Love much as pilgrims rotated for other reasons around the ancient Black Stone. All customers of The Curtain were issued with masks, and Baal, watching the circling masked figures from a high balcony, was satisfied. There were more ways than one of refusing to Submit.
In the months that followed, the staff of The Curtain
warmed to the new task. The fifteen-year-old whore "Ayesha" was the most popular with the paying public, just as her namesake was with Mahound,and like the Ayesha who was living chastely in her apartment in the harem quarters of the great mosque at Yathrib, this Jahilian Ayesha began to be jealous of her preeminent status of Best Beloved. She resented it when any of her "sisters" seemed to be experiencing an increase in visitors, or receiving exceptionally generous tips. The oldest, fattest whore, who had taken the name of "Sawdah", would tell her visitors and she had plenty, many of the
men of Jahilia seeking her out for her maternal and also grateful charms -- the story of how Mahound had married her and Ayesha, on the same day, when Ayesha was just a child. "In the two of us," she would say, exciting men terribly, "he found the two halves of his dead first wife: the child, and the mother, too." The whore "Hafsah" grew as hot- tempered as her namesake, and as the twelve entered into the spirit of their roles the alliances in
the brothel came to mirror the political cliques at the Yathrib mosque; "Ayesha" and "Hafsah", for example, engaged in constant, petty rivalries
against the two haughtiest whores, who had always been thought a bit stuck-up by the others and who had chosen for themselves the most aristocratic identities, becoming "Umm Salamah the Makhzumite" and, snootiest of all, "Ramlah", whose
namesake, the eleventh wife of Mahound, was the daughter of Abu Simbel and Hind. And there was a "Zainab bint Jahsh", and a "Juwairiyah", named after the bride captured on a military expedition, and a "Rehana the Jew", a "Safia" and a"Maimunah", and, most erotic of all the whores, who knew tricks she refused to teach to competitive "Ayesha": the glamorous Egyptian, "Mary the Copt". Strangest of all was the whore who had taken the name of "Zainab bint Khuzaimah", knowing that this wife of Mahound had recently died. The necrophilia
of her lovers, who forbade her to make any movements, was one of the more unsavoury aspects of the new regime at The Curtain. But business was business, and this, too, was a need that the courtesans fulfilled.
By the end of the first year the twelve had grown so skilful in their roles that their previous selves began to fade away. Baal, more myopic and deafer by the month, saw the shapes of the girls moving past him, their edges blurred, their images somehow doubled, like shadows superimposed on shadows. The girls began to entertain new notions about Baal, too. In that age it was customary for a whore, on entering her profession, to take the kind of husband who wouldn't give her any trouble -- a mountain, maybe, or a fountain, or a bush -- so that she could adopt, for form's sake, the title of a married woman. At The
Curtain, the rule was that all the girls married the Love Spout in the central courtyard, but now a kind of rebellion was brewing, and the day came when the prostitutes went together to the Madam to announce that now that they had begun to think of themselves as the wives of the Prophet they required a better grade of husband than some spurting stone, which was almost idolatrous, after all; and to say that they had decided that theywould all become the brides of the bumbler, Baal. At first the Madam tried to talk them out of it, but
when she saw that the girls meant business she conceded the point, and told them to send the writer in to see her. With many giggles and nudges the twelve courtesans escorted the shambling poet into the throne room. When Baal heard the plan his
heart began to thump so erratically that he lost his balance and fell, and "Ayesha" screamed in her fright: "O God, we're going to be his widows before we even get to be his wives."
But he recovered: his heart regained its composure. And, having no option, he agreed to the twelvefold proposal. The Madam then married them all off herself, and in that den of degeneracy, that anti- mosque, that labyrinth of profanity, Baal became
the husband of the wives of the former businessman, Mahound.
His wives now made plain to him that they expected him to fulfil his husbandly duties in every particular, and worked out a rota system under which he could spend a day with each of the girls in turn (at The Curtain, day and night were inverted, the nightbeing for business and the day for rest). No sooner had he embarked upon this arduous programme
than they called a meeting at which he was told that he ought to start behaving a little more like the "real" husband, that is, Mahound. "Why can't you change your name like the rest of us?" bad- tempered "Hafsah" demanded, but at this Baal drew the line. "It may not be much to be proud of," he insisted, "but it's my name. What's more, I don't work with the clients here. There's no business reason for such a change." "Well, anyhow," the voluptuous "Mary the Copt" shrugged, "name or no name, we want you to start acting like him."
"I don't know much about," Baal began to protest, but "Ayesha", who really was the most attractive of them all, or so he had commenced to feel of late, made a delightful moue. "Honestly, husband," she cajoled him. "It's not so tough. We just want you to, you know. Be the boss."
It turned out that the whores of The Curtain were the most old-fashioned and conventional women in Jahilia. Their work, which could so easily have made
them cynical and disillusioned (and they were, of course, capable of entertaining ferocious notions about their visitors), had turned them into dreamers instead. Sequestered from the outside world, they had conceived a fantasy of "ordinary life" in which they wanted nothing more than to be the obedient, and -- yes -- submissive helpmeets of a man who was wise, loving and strong. That is to say: theyears of enacting the fantasies of men had finally corrupted their dreams, so that even in their hearts of hearts they wished to turn themselves into the oldest male fantasy of all. The added spice of acting out the home life of the Prophet had got them all into a state of high excitement, and the bemused Baal discovered what it was to have twelve women competing for his favours, for the beneficence of his smile, as they washed his feet and dried them with their hair, as they oiled his body and danced for
him, and in a thousand ways enacted the dream-- marriage they had never really thought they would have.
It was irresistible. He began to find the confidence
to order them about, to adjudicate between them, to punish them when he was angry. Once when their quarrelling irritated him he forswore them all for a month. When he went to see "Ayesha" after twenty- nine nights she teased him for not having been able to stay away. "That month was only twenty-nine
days long," he replied. Once he was caught with "Mary the Copt" by "Hafsah", in "Hafsah's" quarters and on "Ayesha's" day. He begged "Hafsah" not to tell "Ayesha", with whom he had fallen in love; but she told her anyway and Baal had to stay away from "Mary" of the fair skin and curly hair for quite a time after that. In short, he had fallen prey to the seductions of becoming the secret, profane mirror of Mahound; and he had begun, once again, to write.The poetry that came was the sweetest he had ever written. Sometimes when he was with Ayesha he
felt a slowness come over him, a heaviness, and he had to lie down. "It's strange," he told her. "It is as if I see myself standing beside myself. And I can make him, the standing one, speak; then I get up and write down his verses." These artistic
slownesses of Baal were much admired by his wives. Once, tired, he dozed off in an armchair in the chambers of "Umm Salamah the Makhzumite".
When he woke, hours later, his body ached, his neck and shoulders were full of knots, and he berated Umm Salamah: "Why didn't you wake me?" She answered: "I was afraid to, in case the verses were coming to you." He shook his head. "Don't worry about that. The only woman in whose company the verses come is 'Ayesha', not you."
o o o
Two years and a day after Baal began his life at The Curtain, one of Ayesha's clients recognized him in spite of the dyed skin, pantaloons and body-building exercises. Baal was stationed outside Ayesha's room when the client emerged, pointed right at him and shouted: "So this is where you got to!" Ayesha came running, her eyes blazing with fear. But Baal said, "It's all right. He won't make any trouble." Heinvited Salman the Persian to his own quarters and uncorked a bottle of the sweet wine made with uncrushed grapes which the Jahilians had begun to make when they found out that it wasn't forbidden by what they had started disrespectfully calling the Rule Book.
"I came because I'm finally leaving this infernal city," Salman said, "and I wanted one moment of pleasure out of it after all the years of shit." After Bilal had interceded for him in the name of their old friendship the immigrant had found work as a letterwriter and all-purpose scribe, sitting cross-- legged by the roadside in the main street of the financial district. His cynicism and despair had been burnished by the sun. "People write to tell lies," he said, drinking quickly. "So a professional liar makes an excellent living. My love letters and business correspondence became famous as the best in town because of my gift for inventing beautiful falsehoods that involved only the tiniest departure from the
facts. As a result I have managed to save enough for my trip home in just two years. Home! The old country! I'm off tomorrow, and not a minute too soon."As the bottle emptied Salman began once again to talk, as Baa! had known he would, about the source of all his ills, the Messenger and his message. He told Baal about a quarrel between Mahound and Ayesha, recounting the rumour as if it were incontrovertible fact. "That girl couldn't stomach it
that her husband wanted so many other women," he said. "He talked about necessity, political alliances and so on, but she wasn't fooled. Who can blame her? Finally he went into -- what else? -- one of his trances, and out he came with a message from the archangel. Gibreel had recited verses giving him full divine support. God's own permission to luck as many women as he liked. So there: what could poor Ayesha say against the verses of God? You know what she did say? This: 'Your God certainly jumps to it when you need him to fix things up for you.' Well! If it hadn't been Ayesha, who knows what he'd have done, but none of the others would have dared in
the first place." Baal let him run on without interruption. The sexual aspects of Submission exercised the Persian a good deal: "Unhealthy," he pronounced. "All this segregation. No good will come of it."
At length Baal did start arguing, and Salman was astonished to hear the poet taking Mahound's side: "You can see his point of view," Baal reasoned. "If families offer him brides and he refuses he creates enemies, -- and besides, he's a special man and one can see the argument for special dispensations, -- and as for locking them up, well, what a dishonour it would be if anything bad happened to one of them! Listen, if you lived in here, you wouldn't think a little less sexual freedom was such a bad thing, -- for the common people, I mean.""Your brain's gone," Salman said flatly. "You've been out of the sun too long. Or maybe that costume makes you talk like a clown."
Baal was pretty tipsy by this time, and began some hot retort, but Salman raised an unsteady hand. "Don't want to fight," he said. "Lemme tell you instead. Hottest story in town. Whoowhoo! And it's relevant to whatch, whatchyou say."
Salman's story: Ayesha and the Prophet had gone on an expedition to a far-flung village, and on the way back to Yathrib their party had camped in the dunes for the night. Camp was struck in the dark before the dawn. At the last moment Ayesha was obliged by a call of nature to rush out of sight into a hollow. While she was away her litter--bearers
picked up her palanquin and marched off. She was a light woman, and, failing to notice much differencein the weight of that heavy palanquin, they assumed she was inside. Ayesha returned after relieving herself to find herself alone, and who knows what might have befallen her if a young man, a certain Safwan, had not chanced to pass by on his camel . .
. Safwan brought Ayesha back to Yathrib safe and sound; at which point tongues began to wag, not least in the harem, where opportunities to weaken Ayesha's power were eagerly seized by her opponents. The two young people had been alone in the desert for many hours, and it was hinted, more and more loudly, that Safwan was a dashingly handsome fellow, and the Prophet was much older than the young woman, after all, and might she not therefore have been attracted to someone closer to her own age? "Quite a scandal," Salman
commented, happily.
"What will Mahound do?" Baal wanted to know.
"O, he's done it," Salman replied. "Same as ever. He saw his pet, the archangel, and then informed one and all that Gibreel had exonerated Ayesha."
Salman spread his arms in worldly resignation. "And this time, mister, the lady didn't complain about the convenience of the verses."
o o oSalman the Persian left the next morning with a northbound camel-train. When he left Baal at The Curtain, he embraced the poet, kissed him on both cheeks and said: "Maybe you're right. Maybe it's better to keep out of the daylight. I hope it lasts." Baa! replied: "And I hope you find home, and that there is something there to love." Salman's face went blank. He opened his mouth, shut it again, and left.
"Ayesha" came to Baal's room for reassurance. "He won't spill out the secret when he's drunk?" she asked, caressing Baal's hair. "He gets through a lot of wine."
Baal said: "Nothing is ever going to be the same again." Salman's visit had wakened him from the dream into which he had slowly subsided during his years at The Curtain, and he couldn't go back to sleep.
"Of course it will," Ayesha urged. "It will. You'll see." Baal shook his head and made the only prophetic
remark of his life. "Something big is going to
happen," he foretold. "A man can't hide behind skirts forever."
The next day Mahound returned to Jahilia and soldiers came to inform the Madam of The Curtain that the period of transition was at an end. The brothels were to be closed, with immediate effect. Enough was enough. From behind her drapes, the Madam requested that the soldiers withdraw for an hour in the name of propriety to enable the guests to leave, and such was the inexperience of the officer in charge of the vice-squad that he agreed.The Madam sent her eunuchs to inform the girls and escort the clients out by a back door. "Please apologize to them for the interruption," she ordered the eunuchs, "and say that in the circumstances, no charge will be made."
They were her last words. When the alarmed girls, all talking at once, crowded into the throne room to see if the worst were really true, she made no answer to their terrified questions, are we out of work, how do we eat, will we go to jail, what's to become of us, -- until "Ayesha" screwed up her courage and did what none of them had ever dared attempt. When she threw back the black hangings they saw a dead woman who might have been fifty or a hundred and twenty-five years old, no more than three feet tall, looking like a big doll, curled up in a cushionladen wickerwork chair, clutching the empty poison-bottle in her fist.
"Now that you've started," Baal said, coming into the room, "you may as well take all the curtains down. No point trying to keep the sun out any more."o o o
The young vice-squad officer, Umar, allowed himself to display a rather petulant bad temper when he found out about the suicide of the brothel-keeper. "Well, if we can't hang the boss, we'll just have to make do with the workers," he shouted, and ordered his men to place the "tarts" under close arrest, a
task the men performed with zeal. The women made a noise and kicked out at their captors, but the eunuchs stood and watched without twitching a muscle, because Umar had said to them: "They
want the cunts to be put on trial, but I've no instructions about you. So if you don't want to lose your heads as well as your balls, keep out of this." Eunuchs failed to defend the women of The Curtain while soldiers wrestled them to the ground; and among the eunuchs was Baa!, of the dyed skin and poetry. Just before the youngest "cunt" or "slit" was gagged, she yelled: "Husband, for God's sake, help us, if you are a man." The vice-squad captain was amused. "Which of you is her husband?" he asked, staring carefully into each turban-topped face. "Come on, own up. What's it like to watch the world
with your wife?"Baal fixed his gaze on infinity to avoid "Ayesha's" glares as well as Umar's narrowed eyes. The officer stopped in front of him. "Is it you?"
"Sir, you understand, it's just a term," Baal lied. "They like to joke, the girls. They call us their husbands because we, we. .
Without warning, Umar grabbed him by the genitals and squeezed. "Because you can't be," he said. "Husbands, eh. Not bad."
When the pain subsided, Baal saw that the women had gone. Umar gave the eunuchs a word of advice on his way out. "Get lost," he suggested. "Tomorrow I may have orders about you. Not many people get lucky two days running."
When the girls of The Curtain had been taken away, the eunuchs sat down and wept uncontrollably by
the Fountain of Love. But Baal, full of shame, did not cry.
o o o
Gibreel dreamed the death of Baal:
The twelve whores realized, soon after their arrest, that they had grown so accustomed to their new
names that they couldn't remember the old ones. They "were too frightened to give their jailers their assumed titles,, and as a result were unable to give any names at all. After a good deal of shouting and a good many threats the jailers gave in and registered them by numbers, as Curtain No. 1, Curtain No. 2 and so on. Their former clients, terrified of the consequences of letting slip the secret of what the whores had been up to, also remained silent, so that it is possible that nobody would have found out if the poet Baal had notstarted pasting his verses to the walls of the city jail.
Two days after the arrests, the jail was bursting with prostitutes and pimps, whose numbers had
increased considerably during the two years in which Submission had introduced sexual segregation to Jahilia. It transpired that many Jahilian men were prepared to countenance the jeers of the town riff- raff, to say nothing of possible prosecution under
the new immorality laws, in order to stand below the windows of the jail and serenade those painted
ladies whom they had grown to love. The women inside were entirely unimpressed by these devotions, and gave no encouragement whatsoever to the suitors at their barred gates. On the third
day, however, there appeared among these lovelorn fools a peculiarly woebegone fellow in turban and pantaloons, with dark skin that was beginning to
look decidedly blotchy. Many passers-by sniggered at the look of him, but when he began to sing his verses the sniggering stopped at once. Jahilians had always been connoisseurs of the art of poetry, and the beauty of the odes being sung by the peculiar gent stopped them in their tracks. Baal sang his love poems, and the ache in them silenced the other versifiers, who allowed Baal to speak for them all. At the windows of the jail, it was possible to see for the first time the faces of the sequestered whores, who had been drawn there by the magic of the lines. When he finished his recital he went forward to nail his poetry to the wall. The guards at the gates, their eyes running with tears, made no move to stop him.Every evening after that, the strange fellow would reappear and recite a new poem, and each set of verses sounded lovelier than the last. It was perhaps this surfeit of loveliness which prevented anybody from noticing, until the twelfth evening, when he completed his twelfth and final set of verses, each of which were dedicated to a different woman, that the names of his twelve "wives" were the same as those of another group of twelve.
But on the twelfth day it was noticed, and at once the large crowd that had taken to gathering to hear Baal read changed its mood. Feelings of outrage replaced those of exaltation, and Baal was
surrounded by angry men demanding to know the reasons for this oblique, this most byzantine of insults. At this point Baal took off his absurd turban. "I am Baal," he announced. "I recognize no jurisdiction except that of my Muse; or, to be exact, my dozen Muses."Guards seized him.
The General, Khalid, had wanted to have Baa! executed at once, but Mahound asked that the poet be brought to trial immediately following the whores. So when Baal's twelve wives, who had
divorced stone to marry him, had been sentenced to death by stoning to punish them for the immorality of their lives, Baal stood face to face with the Prophet, mirror facing image, dark facing light. Khalid, sitting at Mahound's right hand, offered Baa! a last chance to explain his vile deeds. The poet told the story of his stay at The Curtain, using the simplest language, concealing nothing, not even his final cowardice, for which everything he had done since had been an attempt at reparation. But now
an unusual thing happened. The crowd packed into that tent of judgment, knowing that this was after all the famous satirist Baa!, in his day the owner of the sharpest tongue and keenest wit in Jahilia, began (no matter how hard it tried not to) to laugh. The more honestly and simply Baal described his
marriages to the twelve "wives of the Prophet", the more uncontrollable became the horrified mirth of the audience. By the end of his speech the good folk of Jahilia were literally weeping with laughter,unable to restrain themselves even when soldiers with bullwhips and scimitars threatened them with instant death.
"I'm not kidding!" Baal screeched at the crowd, which hooted yelled slapped its thighs in response. "It's no joke!" Ha ha ha. Until, at last, silence returned; the Prophet had risen to his feet.
"In the old days you mocked the Recitation," Mahound said in the hush. "Then, too, these people enjoyed your mockery. Now you return to dishonour my house, and it seems that once again you
succeed in bringing the worst out of the people."
Baal said, "I've finished. Do what you want."
So he was sentenced to be beheaded, within the hour, and as soldiers manhandled him out of the tent towards the killing ground, he shouted over his shoulder: "Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive."
Mahound replied, "Writers and whores. I see no difference here."
o o oOnce upon a time there was a woman who did not change.
After the treachery of Abu Simbel handed Jahilia to Mahound on a plate and replaced the idea of the city's greatness with the reality of Mahound's, Hind sucked toes, recited the La-ilaha, and then retreated to a high tower of her palace, where news reached her of the destruction of the Al-Lat temple at Taif, and of all the statues of the goddess that were known to exist. She locked herself into her tower room with a collection of ancient books written in scripts which no other human being injahilia could decipher; and for two years and two months she remained there, studying her occult texts in secret, asking that a plate of simple food be left outside her door once a day and that her chamberpot be
emptied at the same time. For two years and two months she saw no other living being. Then she entered her husband's bedroom at dawn, dressed in all her finery, with jewels glittering at her wrists, ankles, toes, ears and throat. "Wake up," she commanded, flinging back his curtains. "It's a day for celebrations." He saw that she hadn't aged by so much as a day since he last saw her; if anything,
she looked younger than ever, which gave credence to the rumours which suggested that her witchcraft
had persuaded time to run backwards for her within the confines of her tower room. "What have we got to celebrate?" the former Grandee of Jahilia asked, coughing up his usual morning blood. Hind replied:"I may not be able to reverse the flow of history, but revenge, at least, is sweet."
Within an hour the news arrived that the Prophet, Mahound, had fallen into a fatal sickness, that he lay in Ayesha's bed with his head thumping as if it had been filled up with demons. Hind continued to make calm preparations for a banquet, sending servants
to every corner of the city to invite guests. But of course nobody would come to a party on that day.
In the evening Hind sat alone in the great hall of her home, amid the golden plates and crystal glasses of her revenge, eating a simple plate of couscous while surrounded by glistening, steaming, aromatic dishes of every imaginable type. Abu Simbel had refused to join her, calling her eating an obscenity. "You ate his uncle's heart," Simbel cried, "and now you would eat his." She laughed in his face. When the servants began to weep she dismissed them, too, and sat in solitary rejoicing while candles sent strange shadows across her absolute, uncompromising face.
Gibreel dreamed the death of Mahound:
For when the head of the Messenger began to ache
as never before, he knew the time had come when he would be offered the Choice:Since no Prophet may die before he has been shown Paradise, and afterward asked to choose between this world and the next:
So that as he lay with his head in his beloved Ayesha's lap, he closed his eyes, and life seemed to depart from him; but after a time he returned:
And he said unto Ayesha, "I have been offered and made my Choice, and I have chosen the kingdom of God."
Then she wept, knowing that he was speaking of his death; whereupon his eyes moved past her, and seemed to fix upon another figure in the room, even though when she, Ayesha, turned to look she saw only a lamp there, burning upon its stand:
"Who's there?" he called out. "Is it Thou, Azraeel?" But Ayesha heard a terrible, sweet voice, that was a
woman's, make reply: "No, Messenger of Al--Lah, it
is not Azraeel."
And the lamp blew out; and in the darkness Mahound asked: "Is this sickness then thy doing, O Al--Lat?"
And she said: "It is my revenge upon you, and I am satisfied. Let them cut a camel's hamstrings and set it on your grave."Then she went, and the lamp that had been snuffed out burst once more into a great and gentle light, and the Messenger murmured, "Still, I thank Thee, Al--Lat, for this gift."
Not long afterwards he died. Ayesha went out into the next room, where the other wives and disciples were waiting with heavy hearts, and they began mightily to lament:
But Ayesha wiped her eyes, and said: "If there be any here who worshipped the Messenger, let them grieve, for Mahound is dead; but if there be any
here who worship God, then let them rejoice, for He is surely alive."
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