Collected Fictions (6 page)

THE FEIGNER OF INIQUITIES

Takumi no Kami's castle was confiscated, his family ruined and eclipsed, his name linked to execration. His retainers became Rônins.*One rumor has it that the same night the lord committed
hará kiri,
forty-seven of these Rônins met on the summit of a mountain, where in minute detail they planned the act that took place one year later. But the fact is that the retainers acted with well-justified delay, and at least one of their confabulations took place not on the difficult peak of a mountain, but in a chapel in a forest, an undistinguished pavilion of white-painted wood, unadorned save for the rectangular box that held a mirror.

The Rônins hungered for revenge, but revenge must have seemed unattainable. Kira Kôtsuké no Suké, the hated teacher of court etiquette, had fortified his house, and a cloud of archers and swordsmen swarmed about his palanquin. Among his retinue were incorruptible, secret spies upon whom no detail was lost, and no man did they so closely spy upon and follow as the councillor Kuranosuké, the presumed leader of the avenging Rônins. But by chance Kuranosuké discovered the surveillance, and he based his plan for vengeance upon that knowledge.

He moved to Kioto, a city unparalleled throughout the empire for the color of its autumns. He allowed himself to descend into the depths of brothels, gambling dens, and taverns. In spite of the gray hairs of his head, he consorted with prostitutes and poets, and with persons even worse. Once he was expelled from a tavern and woke up to find himself in the street, his head covered with vomit.

It happened that a Satsuma man saw this, and said, sadly yet with anger, "Is not this Oishi Kuranosuké, who was a councillor to Asano Takumino Kami, and who helped him to die yet not having the heart to avenge his lord, gives himself up to women and wine? Faithless beast! Fool and craven! Unworthy the name of a Samurai!"

And he trod on Kuranosuké's face as he slept, and spat on him. When Kôtsuké no Suké's spies reported this passivity, the courtier felt much relieved.

But things did not stop there. The councillor sent his wife and two younger children away and bought a concubine; this iniquitous act cheered the heart and relaxed the fearful prudence of his enemy, who at last dis-missed half his guards.

On one of the bitter nights of the winter of 1703, the forty-seven Rônins met in an unkempt garden on the outskirts of Yedo, near a bridge and the playing card factory. They carried the pennants and banners of their lord. Before they began the assault, they informed the inhabitants of the city that they were not raiding the town but embarking on a military mission of strict justice.

THE SCAR

Two groups attacked the palace of Kira Kôtsuké no Suké. The councillor Kuranosuké led the first, which assaulted the main gate; the second was led by the councillor's elder son, who was not yet sixteen years old and who died that night. History records the many moments of that extraordinarily lucid nightmare—the perilous, pendular descent of the rope ladders, the drum beating the signal of attack, the defenders' rush to defend, the archers posted on the rooftops, the unswerving path of the arrows toward vital organs, the porcelains dishonored by blood, the burning death that turns to ice—all the brazen and disorderly elements of death. Nine of the Rônins died; the defenders were no less brave, and they would not surrender. Shortly after midnight, all resistance ended.

Kira Kôtsuké no Suké, the ignominious cause of all that loyalty, was no-where to be found. The attackers sought him through every corner of the emotion-torn palace; they were beginning to despair of finding him, when the councillor noted that his bedclothes were still warm. Again the Rônins searched, and soon they discovered a narrow window, hidden by a bronze mirror. Below, in a gloomy courtyard, a man in white looked up at them; a trembling sword was in his right hand. When they rushed down, the man gave himself up without a fight. His forehead bore a scar—the old rubric left by Takumi no Kami's blade.

Then the bloody Rônins went down on their knees to the detested nobleman and told him that they were the former retainers of the lord of the castle of Ako, for whose death and perdition he was to blame, and they requested that he commit the suicide that befitted a samurai.

In vain did the retainers propose to the lord's servile spirit that act of self-respect. He was a man impervious to the pleas of honor; at sunrise, the officers had to slit his throat.

THE EVIDENCE

Their thirst for revenge now quenched (but without wrath, or agitation, or regret), the Rônins made their way toward the temple that sheltered the remains of their lord.

In a brass pail they carried the incredible head of Kira Kôtsuké no Suké, and they took turns watching over it. They crossed fields and provinces, in the honest light of day. Men blessed them and wept. The prince of Sendai offered them his hospitality, but they replied that their lord had been waiting for them for almost two years. At last they reached the dark sepulcher, and they offered up the head of their enemy.

The Supreme Court handed down its verdict, and it was as expected: the retainers were granted the privilege of suicide. All obeyed, some with ardent serenity, and they lie now beside their lord. Today, men and children come to the sepulcher of those faithful men to pray.

THE SATSUMA MAN

Among the pilgrims who come to the grave, there is one dusty, tired young man who must have come from a great distance. He prostrates himself before the monument to the councillor Oishi Kuranosuké and he says aloud: "When I saw you lying drunk by the roadside, at the doorstep of a whore-house in Kioto, I knew not that you were plotting to avenge your lord; and, thinking you to be a faithless man, I trampled on you and spat in your face as I passed. I have come to offer atonement." He spoke these words and then committed
hará kiri.

The priest of the temple where Kuranosuké's body lay was greatly moved by the Satsuma man's courage, and he buried him by the side of the Rônins and their lord.

This is the end of the story of the forty-seven loyal retainers—except that the story has no ending, because we other men, who are perhaps not loyal yet will never entirely lose the hope that we might one day be so, shall continue to honor them with our words.*

For Angélica Ocampo

Unless I am mistaken, the original sources of information on Al-Moqanna, the Veiled (or, more strictly, Masked) Prophet of Khorasan, are but four: (a) the excerpts from the
History of the Caliphs
preserved by Bãladhun; (b) the
Manual of the Giant, or Book of Precision and Revision,
by the official historian of the Abbasids, Ibn Ab1 Tahfr Tarfur; (c) the Arabic codex entitled
The Annihilation of the Rose,
which refutes the abominable heresies of the
Rosa Obscura
or
Rosa Secreta,
which was the Prophet's holy work; and (d) several coins (without portraits) unearthed by an engineer named Andrusov on ground that had been leveled for the Trans-Caspian Railway. These coins were deposited in the Numismatic Museum in Tehran; they contain Persian distichs which summarize or correct certain passages from the
Annihilation.
The original
Rosa
has apparently been lost, since the manuscript found in 1899 and published (not without haste) by the Morgenländisches Archive was declared by Horn, and later by Sir Percy Sykes, to be apocryphal.

The fame of the Prophet in the West is owed to Thomas Moore's garru-lous poem
Lolla Rookh,
awork laden with the Irish conspirator's sighs and longings for the East.

THE SCARLET DYE

In the year 120 of the Hegira, or 736 of the Christian era, there was born in Turkestan the man Hakim, whom the people of that time and that region were to call The Veiled. His birthplace was the ancient city of Merv, whose gardens and vineyards and lawns look out sadly onto the desert. Noontime there, when not obscured by choking clouds of sand that leave a film of whitish dust on the black clusters of the grapes, is white and dazzling.

Hakim was raised in that wearied city. We know that one of his father's brothers trained him as a dyer—the craft, known to be a refuge for infidels and impostors and inconstant men, which inspired the first anathemas of his extravagant career.
My face is of gold,
a famous page of the
Annihilation
says,
but I
have steeped the purple dye and on the second night have plunged the uncarded wool into it, and
on the third night have saturated the prepared wool, and the emperors of the islands still contend
for that bloody cloth. Thus did I sin in the years of my youth, deforming the true colors of the
creatures. The Angel would tell me that lambs were not the color of tigers, while Satan would say
to me that the All-Powerful One desired that they be, and in that pursuit he employed my cunning
and my dye. Now I know that neither the Angel nor Satan spoke the truth, for I know that all color
is abominable.

In the year 146 of the Hegira, Hakim disappeared from his native city. The vats and barrels in which he had immersed the cloth were broken, as were a scimitar from Shiraz and a brass mirror.

THE BULL

At the end of the moon of Sha'ban in the year 158, the air of the desert was very clear, and a group of men were looking toward the west in expectation of the moon of Ramadan, which inspires fasting and mortification. They were slaves, beggars, horse sellers, camel thieves, and butchers. Sitting gravely on the ground before the gate of an inn at which caravans stopped on the road to Merv, they awaited the sign. They looked at the setting sun, and the color of the setting sun was the color of the sand.

From far out on the dizzying desert (whose sun gives men fever and whose moon brings on convulsions), they saw three figures, apparently of immense height, coming toward them. The three figures were human, but the one in the center possessed the head of a bull. As these figures came closer, the man in the center was seen to be wearing a mask, while the two men that accompanied him were blind.

Someone (as in the tales of the
Thousand and One Nights)
asked the reason for this wonder.
They are
blind,
the masked man said,
because they have looked upon my face.

THE LEOPARD

The historian of the Abbasids relates that the man from the desert (whose voice was extraordinarily sweet, or so, in contrast to the harshness of the mask, it seemed to be) told the men that though they were awaiting the sign of a month of penitence, he would be for them a greater sign: the sign of an entire
life
of penitence, and a calumniated death. He told them that he was Hakim, son of Ozman, and that in the year 146 of the Flight a man had entered his house and after purifying himself and praying had cut his, Hakim's, head off with a scimitar and taken it up to the heavens. Borne in the right hand of this visitor (who was the angel Gabriel), his head had been taken before the Almighty, who had bade him prophesy, entrusting him with words of such antiquity that speaking them burned one's mouth and endowed one with such glorious resplendence that mortal eyes could not bear to look upon it. That was the reason for his mask. When every man on earth professed the new law, the Visage would be unveiled to them, and they would be able to worship it without danger—as the angels did already. His message delivered, Hakim exhorted the men to
jihad
—a holy war—and the martyrdom that accompanied it.

The slaves, beggars, horse sellers, camel thieves, and butchers denied him their belief—one voice cried
sorcerer,
another,
impostor.

Someone had brought a leopard—perhaps a member of that lithe and bloodthirsty breed trained by Persian huntsmen. At any rate, it broke free of its cage. Save for the masked Prophet and his two acolytes, all the men there trampled one another in their haste to flee. When they returned, the beast was blind. In the presence of those luminous, dead eyes, the men worshiped Hakim and admitted his supernatural estate.

THE VEILED PROPHET

The official historian of the Abbasids narrates with no great enthusiasm the inroads made by Hakim the Veiled in Khorasan. That province—greatly moved by the misfortune and crucifixion of its most famous leader— embraced with desperate fervor the doctrine offered by the Shining Visage and offered up to him its blood and gold. (Hakim by now had exchanged his harsh mask for a fourfold veil of white silk embroidered with precious stones. Black was the symbolic color of the caliphs of the House of Abbas; Hakim chose the color white—the most distant from it—for his shielding Veil, his banners, and his turbans.) The campaign began well. It is true that in the
Book of Precision
it is the
caliph's
pennants that are victorious every-where, but since the most frequent result of those victories is the stripping of the generals of their rank and the abandonment of impregnable castles, it is not difficult for the sagacious reader to read between the lines. Toward the end of the moon of Rajab in the year 161, the famous city of Nishapur opened its iron gates to the Masked One; in early 162, the city of Astarabad did likewise. Hakim's military operations (like those of another, more fortunate Prophet) were limited to his tenor chanting of prayers offered up to the Deity from the hump of a reddish-colored camel in the chaotic heart of battle. Arrows would whistle all around him, yet he was never wounded. He seemed to seek out danger—the night a band of loathsome lepers surrounded his palace, he had them brought to him, he kissed them, and he made them gifts of gold and silver.

The Prophet delegated the wearying details of governing to six or seven adepts. He was a scholar of meditation and of peace—a harem of 114 blind wives attempted to satisfy the needs of his divine body.

ABOMINABLE MIRRORS

So long as their words do not altogether contravene orthodox belief, confidential friends of God are tolerated by Islam, however indiscreet or threatening to that religion they may be. The Prophet would perhaps not have spurned the advantages of that neglect, but his followers, his victories, and the public wrath of the caliph—whose name was Muhammadal-Mahd1— forced him into heresy. It was that dissent that ruined him, though first it led him to set down the articles of a personal religion (a personal religion that bore the clear influence of gnostic forebears).