Ink (51 page)

And he tells Carter how it is a terrible thing, Captain Englishman, a terrible thing, to hear a horse scream as you shoot it in its belly, as it leaps so beautiful over your head.

“To destroy,” he says, “such creatures …”

He talks of a cavalryman whose horse he brought down, how he ran at the Turk, with tears in his eyes and the rifle of a dead man in his hands, how he still staggered on with two bullets in his chest. The third shot had finally dropped the cavalryman, but not before his bayonet took a slice out of the old Turk's calf.

“It was not deep, Captain Englishman. It would have heal very quick, but” [he shakes his head] “not in the desert.”

The Turks had been routed from Beersheba, without time even to poison the wells, and he had hobbled into the desert with his squad, leaning on this comrade's shoulder or that one's, half carried at times by young men who knew he'd been at Sarikamish and Gallipoli, men to whom he was the Old Man, a mascot of sorts. They'd thought he was mad to lead them out into the waste; but the Old Man knew the desert, oh yes, knew much about the desert, so they trusted him.

By the time they reached Tel-el-Sheria, the gangrene had already set in.

“Do you know how I wake after they cut my leg off, Captain Englishman? I wake in the ruins of a hospital, dead men all around me. I wake into morphine dreams, Captain Englishman.”

Having broken the line at Beersheba, the English were pressing their advantage, pressing for Jerusalem by Christmas, and on to Damascus. The doctor's saw had barely finished its work, the last stitch only just in place, when the first shells brought the roof of the hospital down.

“I am not sure what is real about that time, Captain Englishman, what I saw and what I only thought I saw.”

He talks of being woken by the pain, crawling through the ruins, the shells still falling around him. Somehow he had found more morphine, and somehow in the morphine he had found the strength to keep going, even as the walls fell around him. More shells, and then grenades and gunfire. Soldiers screaming.
I saw a man made of fire, Captain Englishman, a djinn.
Skeleton horses ridden by angels. Blasts of blue-green fire like orchid blossoms, too symmetrical, too sculpted to be real. Dust devils, black as night, rising out of the wounds of fallen soldiers. He saw sights so strange in his delirium that he hadn't noticed the shrapnel in his right arm till he was lying in the desert sands outside the town, hidden between a dead horse and a rock.

“My mother, she is of the desert,” he says. “Not Turk, but not Arab, no. My mother, she teach me many things about the desert, things even the Bedu do not
know Many salts in the sands here. Bury a thing in the sand here, Captain, and it keep forever.”

There's a sly look to his face as he taps the scar up near the shoulder of his withered arm, where the nerves must have been severed.

“Dead things keep forever in salt, Captain Englishman.”

Carter feels a shiver run down his back. That hawklike eye somehow doesn't seem as human now; there's a different challenge in the way it fixes him with its gaze, no longer demanding that he see the man beneath the mutilation, but that he see some deeper truth beneath the man, a truth that is perhaps not quite sane.

Carter stands up.
Where
is that bloody boy?

“I have not finish my story, Captain Englishman. I have not finish. Stay. Let me finish my story.”

And now he tells Carter of the last days of his war: of being found, this maimed thing, mad on morphine, by the retreating Eighth Army as they fell back under the British advance; and of the fall of Gaza and Jerusalem under siege. It was November 1917, and Lawrence was dead in Deraa, a symbol for Faisal to rally the failing Arab Revolt around. It was November 1917, and Kemal Ataturk was in Istanbul, relieved of command by Pasha, brooding, gathering his Nationalist uprising against Germany's lackey Sultan. And then Ataturk and his men had seized the
Sultan YavuzSelim
and the
Middili
, the German gunships sitting in the Sea of Marmara ready to defend Istanbul… or to level it if need be. And Ataturk was dead in the mutiny, and the Nationalists had a martyr.

The coup had plunged the Turkish forces in Palestine into chaos, trying to act on conflicting orders or no orders at all. By early December Damascus was under siege, supply lines cut off, the city starving. And so, on the very day the Turks agreed to their armistice, leaving Germany to fight its own battles, this half-ruined wreck of a man had been caught stealing food from the storeroom of the military hospital where he was recuperating, and the final insult had been perpetrated on what remained of him.

The old man's eye pins Carter to the step.

“Was it mercy, do you think, Captain Englishman? Blind law? I steal with my left hand—how do you say? I pinch, yes, pinch. But they take my
right
hand. Useless right hand! Dead! Dry like fig! Tradition, Captain Englishman, tradition. Do you like my story, Captain Englishman?”

Carter says nothing.

“Ah,” says the old man, “I give you better than words. I show you, Captain Englishman. I show you what happen to me. I
show
you my story.”

He waves his left arm round as if to take in the steps and the terminal behind them, the crowd going in and out. But it's his ragged bundles he's gesturing at, Carter realizes.

“You see,” says the beggar [he begins unwrapping one of the smaller bundles of rags] “I
save
my fingers from Sarikamish. Look. See.” Carter feels the bile rise in his throat. “And I crawl in the sand in Suez. Do I hear the shells and bullets? No.”

He tugs at the corner of another bundle but Carter is still staring at the contents of the first. It's not possible. For the love of God, it's not possible.

“So I crawl in the sand. I find what is left of my ear,” says the old Turk.

He grins, still chuckling to himself as he peels the second bundle open. The dead flesh of the fingers and… what's little more than a lump of gristle now sit on their filthy rags like some exotic roots he's offering for sale, fruits dried black in the sun. Carter looks at the madman but there's nothing he can say as the man hauls the largest of the bundles thumping down the steps and around in front of him, peels it open.

“I carry my own leg with me through the desert while the morphine shows me angels and devils. Dig it out of the debris. You understand, Captain Englishman? You understand why I do this? Is mine. Belongs to me.”

“For God's sake, man—”

“And I keep my hand too. They take it for stealing, but is
mine.”

He picks the last of the bundles open, like a child opening a handkerchief that wraps an apple for their teacher.

“I have names for them all, you know,” the old man says. “My—how do you say this?—spoils of war. My treasures.”

His voice is rising, mad now, clearly mad, as Carter backs away.

“I call these
fingers Armenia.
I call this scrap of
ezr Sinai.
I call this
legPalestine
, and this dead arm, ah yes, Captain Englishman, I call this
the Holy City of Jerusalem.”

Down a step. Another. Carter turns. Anywhere. Away, just away. The voice calls after him.

“What do you think of that, Captain Englishman? And this severed hand, dried in the desert dust, dead before it was even lost, what shall I call this, Captain Englishman? Shall I call it
Syria?”

When at last I found the boy,
writes Carter
, the most curious thing is that I found him being taunted by a group of five or six young Arab children, girls and boys,
all smaller than him, all terribly brave in their numbers, and all utterly vicious in their hatred. You would have thought he was Lucifer himself, the way they hurled abuse at him, called him
shaitan …
enemy … devil. One vile little thug had a stone in his hand ready to throw, and would have done, I'm quite sure, had I not been there to take it from him and send him packing with a clip round the ear. Needless to say, they all took flight with the cowardice of any bully, but I felt quite sorry for my poor native guide; he was in such a sorry state, spittle on his face and more than a few scratches on his hands where he ‘d been fending off their sticks.

But that's not the curious thing, Anna.

“Are you all right, lad?” says Carter. “No bones broken, eh?Just a few scratches. “The boy nods, wipes a gob of spit from his forehead and yells at the running children. He seems more irritated than shaken, no tears, no great release of fear in visible relief, just a black scowl and curses, like a cheated merchant who can't abandon his stall to chase a thief.

The strange thing is,
writes Carter
, that as soon as the thugs had been scattered I realized Samuel was quite right in at least one of his ideas. You see, this lad Tamuz could easily have broken free of his tormenters and outrun them. If he'd been able to fight, in fact, he could have held his own against these toughs, I'm sure. But as soon as they were gone, well, he just stood there. I only noticed then that one of the little blighters had drawn a circle on the ground around him, you see, and he absolutely refused to cross it. Wouldn't budge an inch. His tormentors had simply been standing out of reach beyond this line drawn in the dust, swinging their sticks and throwing stones and curses at him. A devil indeed, trapped in a circle for the righteous to torment. Or so they clearly thought.

The line has been scratched in the dust, probably with the same stick that's left its mark on the lad's hand, and the boy's foot moves toward it, pulls back. Shoulders in an almost-shrug, hands up and out, he seems to be groping for an explanation. How can an Englishman understand this? thinks Carter wryly.

Carter kicks his boot into the dust, breaking the circle, and Tamui cocks his head in curiosity. How
can
an Englishman understand this?

“You're Yezidi, yes?”says Carter.

Ever since Samuel first told me of this tribe of his, well, Anna, I've always been rather sceptical. I've always found his theories fascinating, enlightening even, regardless of what others may say. But with all my time in Kurdistan, with all the Yezidi I've met, fought beside, I've always, to be honest, thought it quite absurd
to link their strange customs and beliefs to the Dead Sea Valley of all places. The Yezidi may have their stories of war in heaven, fallen angels and ancient giants, but these are clearly rooted in the Magian and Manichaean heresies native to Persia. The people take their very name from the Persian word for angel, after all. And what with the path that Samuel's research has taken him down these last ten years, well, Samuel's methods have become … unorthodox.

I have to confess now that he must be on to something. It can't just be a few coincidental correspondences between the Kurdish heresies and the stories of these Enakites, not when I've seen exactly the same thing happen, why, three or four times up around Lake Van—Yezidi children trapped in a circle, harried mercilessly because they absolutely will not step over that line.

And why?

The boy knows nothing
ofthese Yezidi,
but he tries to give an explanation.

“As Ab Irim said to his servant, Eliezer, “the boy says, “these are the ways we carry with us. From the hills of Irad, we brought these ways. To the city of Ur, we brought these ways. To the city of Haran, we brought these ways. To the cities of Sid-dim, we brought these ways. “

The boy looks earnest, brow furrowed solemnly as he repeats the learned formula. Then a smile and a blink.

Carter wonders if he even knows where these places are, Haran in the north where the Hittites ruled, Ur down in the Mesopotamian delta where civilisation began. And Irad … Eridu, perhaps one of the oldest Sumerian cities? Or Aratta, even? Aratta, which had such strong ties with Sumer that its people were considered cousins, but whkh lay somewhere far to the north in the mountainous region later known as Urartu, in the hills of Ararat.

As far as the Muslim Kurds and the Christian Armenians are concerned the Yezidi are devil worshippers, if not devils outright. And it is true that they worship a Peacock Angel they call Melek Tawus, the captain of the angels and, like Lucifer, a rebel and an outcast… but in their religion one who's later forgiven, reinstated. But the Yezidi are really not the fiends that they're made out to be. The whole circle thing, as it turns out, is not half as sinister as it might seem. The circle is drawn during disputes, for those who stand in it to testify. I rather think it represents the tribe; to tell a lie whilst within it is to … poison one's whole society, and to refuse to act within its bounds—to leave it, to step over that line—it would be a surrendering of one's very identity as a member of the tribe. The young, I believe, understand the power of the taboo but not the purpose.

The point is, if this boy is anything to go by, Samuel's Enakites are indeed
distant cousins of the Yezidi. I still have no truck with Samuel's fancy that these tales of angels are something more than crass distortions of the Bible. But I am intrigued.

The boy steps out of the broken circle, taking the offered handkerchief from Carter's hand and dabbing at his scratches. The copper tone of his skin makes sense now. If his people aren ‘t Bedu, aren ‘t Arabs at all… Carter thinks of the old beggar's words: My mother, she teach me many things about the desert, things even the Bedu do not know.

“Come, Carter Bey,” says Tamuz. “I will take you now. The car is close.”

He winks at Carter for some unfathomable reason.

“You will like your driver. He is English, like you. “

A
Sudden Nameless Yang

“Aye, right! Scots!” says the man sat on the sideboard of the Rolls. “Did this wee nyaff tell ye Ah was English? Aye, you, ya wee bastard—sorry, sir, pardon ma language an a’, but it's been a while since Ah've had a gentleman in here, like, apart fae himsel’, ye know, and he's no yer average gent, disnae really staun on ceremony, but—ye know?—the Baron, Ah mean.”