Pilgermann

12

Time, it seems, has passed. The triangular tiles of Hidden Lion have covered all of Bembel Rudzuk’s stone square, but the pattern has in its turn been so covered by people, by stalls, by booths and tents and awnings that the surge of its action is obscured by the action of every day; the twisting serpents, the shifting pyramids, the appearing and disappearing lions are mostly hidden.

It happened by degrees. I have already told how men, women, and children walked on Hidden Lion in special ways, how they danced on it with particular things in mind, how they gave money which was put into the tiles. Without anyone’s being told the name became known; people used it in giving directions. Hidden Lion became a meeting-place, and in time a man asked permission to establish a coffee stand in the noon shadow of the tower at the centre. Permission was given, and the fragrance of coffee became part of the pattern. Other applicants were quick to follow, and stallholders appeared selling cooked food, melons and oranges, pots and pans, carpets, caged birds, jewelry and weapons. They occupied their spaces rent-free; since the completion of the tiling Bembel Rudzuk had accepted no more money.

Hidden Lion became not only the liveliest of bazaars but also a good-luck place almost sacred to those who had experienced its power. There were lovers who had sworn to each other on a particular tile and by the appropriate names of Allah; there were children at whose birth money had been put into tiles inscribed will the names of Allah The Guide, The Preventer, The Enricher. Bargains were struck, partnerships founded, parents honoured and the dead remembered in the tiles of Hidden Lion.

Every day has a dawn, every day a midnight: sometimes we mark by the one, sometimes by the other. Came the month of July and its days marched like a procession of penitents towards the Ninth of Av; then did I count the days by the nights. When there came the first anniversary of my night with Sophia I paced the roof of Bembel Rudzuk’s house feeling as if I were wrapped in the burning scroll of my love, my lust, my sin, my wisdom, my transcendent mortality. God was poor, I thought, to be immortal.

Towards the middle of August came Ramadhan. The city was like an oven. The sounds of the street withdrew into the silence of exhaustion and the continual growling murmur of the Quran. From that time before dawn when a white thread could be distinguished from a black one the Muslims fasted until sunset, when the call of the mu’addhin like the darkness eased the city into night, prayer, food, and more reciting of the Quran.

The twenty-seventh of Ramadhan, the Lailat al-Qadr, the Night of Power on which Muhammad received his first revelation, was to Bembel Rudzuk an especially important night. ‘The Quran tells us that this Night of Power is better than a thousand months,’ he said: ‘it is all time, it is no time, it is beyond the bounds of reckoning and measurement. It may be that even the idea of it puts the mind into a special state: always on this night I have a dream that is not like the dreams of other nights; always on this night comes a strong way-showing dream.’ His face looked young, it was so full of eagerness and excitement.

As on many nights that summer we were sleeping on the roof. We stayed up late talking, and I looked for but could not find the Virgin and the Lion among the stars. ‘Only part of the Lion can be seen now,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. He tried to show me where it was but I could only recognize the Lion when together with the Virgin it made that gesture that had so imprinted itself on my mind.

Towards dawn I was awakened by a thumping on the roof: it was Bembel Rudzuk dancing in his nightdress. His eyes were closed; he was dancing in his sleep. It was a shuffling, stamping dance in which there were many formal turnings of the body, many hieratic movements of the arms close to the body. It was an earthy dance, nothing of it moved up into the air; it was as if earth had formed itself into a man and the man was dancing himself back into the earth. Bembel Rudzuk danced more and more slowly and more and more deeply until the body that I saw before me stood motionless like the nymphal shell left behind by a dragonfly. But Bembel Rudzuk, unlike the dragonfly, seemed not to have flown away into the air but to have danced himself out of his body into the earth.

The shell of Bembel Rudzuk opened its eyes and Bembel Rudzuk looked out of them.

‘Was this your dream?’ I said. ‘Were you dancing your dream?’

‘Earth,’ he said. ‘I was dancing earth.’ ‘Are you awake?’ I said.

‘Which is the dream?’ he said.

After the Lailat al-Qadr I began to think of preparing myself a little for the days that were coming. Now when I say that I see in my mind those stubborn Frankish tents before the walls of Antioch, I see the arrogance of the Franks in the way they walk, in the way they sit their horses. At that time I had seen nothing of them, I only sensed their approach, and this awareness of them moving towards us mingled with the picture that was always in my mind of the sprawled bodies of the dead Jews of our town, most of whom had never in their lives held a sword in their hands. I did not care for that style of dying, and accordingly I asked Bembel Rudzuk to instruct me in horsemanship and the use of weapons.

The prohibition of the riding of horses and the carrying of weapons by non-Muslims was not consistently enforced in Antioch; the rigour varied with the times and with the moods of the Governor and his officers. At that time Yaghi-Siyan had not yet become as uneasy about the loyalty of Christians and Jews as he was to be a few months later — it was Firouz that I had to be mindful of; as he had already taken notice of my non-wearing of a yellow turban and belt it seemed wise not to attract his attention again. Bembel Rudzuk and a servant used to ride out of the city leading a third horse and I would follow them on foot to the hills east of the Orontes where I then mounted and rode on with them. So I had the use of a horse and weapons as often as I liked, and Firouz, who of course knew about it, seemed content that his authority was recognized within the walls; in any case he made no trouble.

Bembel Rudzuk was an excellent teacher. His youth had been active and adventurous and his strength and vigour seemed little diminished at his present age; he was a dashing horseman and he was expert with bow and sword. Our rides continued even after the siege began — it was months before the blockade was complete— and after not too long a time I rode well enough for Bembel Rudzuk to say that I might have made a horseman if I had come to it earlier in life; eventually I shot well enough with the Turkish bow to bring down game; our swordplay continued in Bembel Rudzuk’s courtyard long after the rides had stopped, and with the curved Turkish sword and the straight blade both I progressed to where Bembel Rudzuk was at least as eager as I for a rest at the end of our practice. Sometimes as I swung my blunted sword I seemed to see behind Bembel Rudzuk the shadowy and as yet faceless form of actuality to come.

One day followed another through months that bore different names, numbered themselves by the sun or the moon, and began and ended on different days in the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian calendars. Strange, to live again one’s life and death in three calendars! Soon after the Lailat al-Qadr of the Hijra year 490 in the month of September of the Christian year 1097 came the Jewish High Holy Days, the Days of Awe: Rosh Hashanah, the New Year’s Day of 4858, and ten days later Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Ah! then I felt my eunuchhood, my separateness from any congregation! It was no use to tell myself that God was no longer He and that accounts were no longer being kept — centuries of moral reckoning leapt up in me. It was in me; I was in it: it was like a giant wave, an impulse racing across vast expanses of time, living its motion through successive particles of mortality.

This would now be the second Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur since I had left my town. The last time these Days of Awe had come I had been on the road alone, there had been no congregation to be cut off from when the shofar was blown, when the Kol Nidrei was sung at the beginning of the fast and when the Ne’ilah Service was recited, the book and the gates closed, and the Shema, the ‘Hear, O Israel!’ heard at the end. Here in Antioch however there was a congregation and I had with words out of my own mouth cut myself off from it; I didn’t want to be part of anybody else’s traffic with God. But I wanted something; I thought perhaps that I wanted to hear the sound of the ram’s horn, the shofar. The urgent maleness of that trumpeting always lifted me and quickened my blood: it was so much a call to action, it was so utterly not the murmur of praying, swaying, weaponless victims — was it not itself the weapon of the ram that had borne it? And did it not also recall that ram that had appeared when the Lord stayed the hand of Abraham as Isaac lay bound and waiting for the knife? And more: this trumpeting of the ram’s horn was for me the summons from the dreadful mountain of the Law, a summons that could not be ignored or denied. And I see, now that my mind is no longer limited by my mortal identity, that this Law is nothing that could be limited to those commandments on the two stones: no, this Law that is so imperious is simply the law of the allness of the everything of which each of us is a particle. Quick! Now! Rise up from your sleep, from your unbeing! Be! Do! Respond!

Be! Do! What? Before Rosh Hashanah, as the end of the month of Elul and the beginning of Tishri approached, I went by night to the synagogue. It was huddled away among the houses of the Jewish quarter, it stood among the smells of various dyes, even those reds and purples flaunted by those knightly wearers of the Cross who were now approaching us. This not very large domed building, said by some to have been built on the ruin of a Roman smithy, had been chosen because of its thick walls through which the warlike sound of the shofar could not be heard. It stood among the houses and the rainbowed smells like an honest workman who, finished with the toil of the week, has cleansed himself and put on fresh clothes for the Sabbath. There were no windows facing the street, there was no light to be seen except what came through the open door from the inner court.

I put my hand on the wall that separated me from the space where the shofar had sounded that day as it had all through the month of Elul. The heat of the day had gone out of the wall, it was cool. As I stood there a man named Mordechai Salzedo, a merchant friend of Bembel Rudzuk, came to me and said, ‘From the roof of the synagogue we have seen the new moon; now the new year can begin.’

‘Good luck to it,’ I said.

At this irreverence he raised his eyebrows and tilted his head to favour, I suppose, the analytical side of his brain while he looked at me carefully. Having done this he put one hand on my shoulder and lifted the index finger of the other.’ “Where he is” eh?’ he said. ‘“Where he is.’”

What a remarkable Salzedo this was! When he said those words it was as if there came through the cool thick wall of the synagogue, through my hand and arm and into my heart the New Year’s Days of time past when our Rabbi had read those very words from Chapter 21 of Genesis, where it tells of Hagar and Ishmael in the wilderness, Hagar weeping because she thinks that her son will die:

And God heard the voice of the lad; and the angel of God called to Hagar out of heaven, and said unto her: ‘What aileth thee, Hagar? fear not; for God hath heard the voice of the lad where he is. Arise, lift up the lad, and hold him fast by thy hand; for I will make him a great nation.’ And God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water; and she went, and filled the bottle with water, and gave the lad drink.

Our Rabbi had always been fond of citing the Midrash Rabbah on these verses:

WHERE HE IS connotes for his own sake, for a sick person’s prayers on his own behalf are more efficacious than those of anyone else.

WHERE HE IS. R. Simon said: The ministering angels hastened to indict him, exclaiming, ‘Sovereign of the Universe! Wilt Thou bring up a well for one who will one day slay Thy children with thirst?’ ‘What is he now?’ He demanded. ‘Righteous,’ was the answer. ‘I judge man only as he is at the moment,’ said He.

Wonderful. So WHERE WAS I? Could it be said of me that at this moment I was righteous? I couldn’t think of any harm that I was doing just then. What about my pilgrimage, my road to Jerusalem that went on now without me? At this distance I believe that I am telling the truth when I say that it was not the Mittelteufel that kept me in Antioch. I had begun my pilgrimage wanting to save the many mysterious, unseen, fragile temples of the world so that Christ would not leave us as God had done when he ceased to be He. Now as I thought about it I found that Christ as a limited identity had already departed from my perception and been absorbed into the manifold idea of himself. And what for me had been Jerusalem was equally to be found wherever I joined the motion of the hidden lion. I remembered those poor hungry death-ridden children whom I had met on the road and I heard again in my mind the voice of that boy who had said, ‘Jerusalem will be wherever we are when we come to the end.’

Salzedo was no longer standing before me, I was alone. The door through which the light had come was closed. In the darkness my hand was still touching the wall of the synagogue but now when I thought of the sound of the shofar it seemed to jar on the silence.

One day has followed another with the beating of hammers, the baking of bread, the cry of the mu’addhin. It is the winter of 1097. The walls of Antioch, those great mountain-ascending walls with their four hundred towers, those strong stones left from Justinian’s strong time, those stones that have no enemy, now they look down on the tents of the Franks. Antioch has been under siege since October but it is the besiegers who are starving. How strange they are, these scarecrow conquerors, these soldiers of Christ who refuse to learn how to fight the Turks, who at Dorylaeum won the day by their very stupidity when the half of their divided host with whom they had lost contact came out of nowhere like miraculous saviours to astonish and defeat Qilij-Arslan’s mounted bowmen. They walk, starving as they are, like victors; they walk as if they shake the ground, believing themselves to be invincible, believing that God wills it that they should win. The arrogance of those coloured tents of the Frankish knights! Through successive dawns they stand more frightening in their presumption than shouts and battlecries and the thundering of hooves, these tents in which these unturning men dare to sleep before the enemy walls, dare to sleep in their unclever and unshakable courage and the expectation of victory.

Soldiers of Christ! The marvel, the continual surprise of Christ is that he includes everything that attributes itself to the idea of him. Because I have seen Christ, have talked with him, have heard the strange woodwind of his voice inside my head, have looked into his lion eyes, I know that there looks out of his eyes, as out of the eyes of Vermeer’s young girl with the pearl earring, the intolerable bursting of the beginning of all things. From that unimaginable violence which is God as It has come all that there is: all the world, all the universe. I know this in many ways but I need to know it in more ways, I need to put myself where the Idea of It is, I need to move at the same speed as It, become altogether one with It so that there is no jump to be made, this jump that we so much fear at the time of death. I must become as advanced as possible in this because I sense that my time is fast approaching, that time when my young death will be full-grown and ready to go out into the world, leaving me, the fond and used-up parent, behind.

I know that my death will be ready soon because now in this winter of 1097 I have seen the tax-collector again for the first time since I came to this part of the world. Suddenly one morning he was there, his naked headless body still writhing with maggots, his member tumescent with bloat, his naked feet moving over the triangles of Hidden Lion. He was gesturing with his hand as if making a speech or admonishing someone or possibly counting, possibly reckoning up something. I tried to make myself not hear his voice while at the same time I strained to hear it. I did hear it, I heard his voice and I heard the words he was saying with utter clarity but even as I heard I forgot; it was like waking up from a dream with everything still in the mind but as you sit up in bed it is gone.

After that he was always there, always walking through the sounds and smells, the colour and motion of the Hidden Lion bazaar like someone with a fixed idea, like a madman who talks to himself; always did he gesture with his hand in that particular way; always did I forget what he was saying as soon as I heard it but one thing became inescapable: it was I that he was talking about, it was my account that he was reckoning up.

None of the others had turned up yet: not Udo the relic-gatherer, not the bear shot full of arrows, not Bodwild and Konrad, not Bruder Pförtner, not my young death. I understood that the tax-collector had come to give me notice that my life would soon be required of me but I did not think that the final stage of things would begin until I saw my young death once more. When last I saw him he had looked at me, as I have said, trustingly. It was my constant fear that I should fall short of his expectations — I wanted so much to do my best for him, I wanted so much to do my uttermost possible. More and more it was not the face of Sophia and her naked body that my mind offered me in its pictures: it was the obscure face of my young death; it was the shadowy form of actuality to come. I persevered with my martial exercises.

So. Now I walk a little differently from the way I used to, and I stand on the wall and look down at the enemy as one who will not die without making trouble.

These Franks encamped before our walls, they have come as the seasons come or as old age and death come; in their time they are there, they are not to be avoided. Antioch stands between them and Jerusalem; it cannot get out of their way nor can they afford to bypass it and leave a fortified enemy in their rear.

We have heard of the coming of the Franks; we have heard of them at Constantinople, we have heard how one of them sat himself down on the throne of Alexius Comnenus and told the Emperor that in his own country he had waited in vain at the crossroads for anyone to answer his challenge to single combat.

I have told how the price of a bale of silk went up by three dinars in Tripoli when the Franks arrived in Constantinople. When they besieged Nicaea and Nicaea surrendered to the troops of Alexius the price of silk went up by one more dinar. ‘Last time it was uncertainty of supply that sent the price up,’ said Bembel Rudzuk; ‘this time the sheep are not so frightened of the wolf as they were; some of the sheep are saying that this is not a devouring wolf, it is a buying wolf.’

From Dorylaeum, from Heraclea, from Marash the wave of their coming ran ahead of the Franks. We heard of Baldwin in Edessa, how he became co-regent with Prince Thoros of Edessa and how Thoros ended up with his head on a pole. After Dorylaeum the price of silk went back to where it had been before the Franks arrived in Constantinople; it paused there, then dropped by one dinar. ‘Perhaps this is after all that end-of-the-world wolf of whom one has heard,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘Perhaps this is the wolf who will swallow the sun. The market has become a swamp, a mire, a bog, a place with no firm ground whatever. The beggars are tying up their bundles and the great houses are closing the shutters.’

It was the victory at Dorylaeum that made everyone begin to wonder whether the battle cry of the Franks, ‘God wills it!’, might be a true statement of how things were. Perhaps God did will it. Or perhaps they were simply lucky. But what was luck if not the will of God? There were those in Antioch who dedicated themselves unsparingly to the pondering of that question, and if the smoking of water pipes and the drinking of strong coffee could have repelled the Franks the city would never have been in danger.

It was pondered that at Dorylaeum the Franks had behaved so stupidly that almost it seemed the paradigm of a mystery not to be understood by the unfavoured. To divide their host into two columns not in communication with each other! To separate the foot-soldiers from the cavalry as they had done! To fall back upon the tents in panic and to be saved at the last moment by the arrival of the other half of the army! Did the two columns symbolize Jesus the son and God the father? Body and soul? Adam and Eve? Sulphur and Mercury? There were as many opinions as there were ponderers.

Yaghi-Siyan, uncertain of God’s will, sent for help to Rudwan of Aleppo, to Duqaq of Damascus, to Karbuqa of Mosul. Rudwan said no; Duqaq said yes, as did his atabeg Tughtagin and Janah Ad-Dawla of Horns; Karbuqa also said yes. Yaghi-Siyan, hoping for quick relief, then organized his defences, laid in supplies, and made ready to become history.

It is to be assumed that the soldiers of Christ all thought of God as He, and to them it soon became evident that He did not will that Antioch should fall too quickly. I too out of habit still thought of him sometimes as He but mostly I recognized him as It, the raw motive power of the universe; and I was able to see in the systole and diastole of the siege of Antioch the reciprocal action of that asymmetry without which there would be only stillness and silence.

The four-hundred-towered walls built by Justinian and kept in good repair by the Byzantines were the pivot of the action; they were the fixed point at the centre of that particular dance; they would not give way, they would go on yet awhile defining an inside and an outside. Yaghi-Siyan on the inside still had enough food but not enough men; he could neither defend his walls at every point nor could he go out and defeat the Franks in one decisive battle.

The Franks could take up positions only on three sides of Antioch; they were prevented on the fourth side by Mount Silpius which kept a back door open for the besieged. As the Franks ran out of food some of them, like sparrows, picked through manure for the grain in it; some died of starvation; some deserted. They were always foraging through a countryside more and more empty of everything except Turks in ambush and they had of course to beat off such armies as came to relieve Antioch. Yaghi-Siyan made sorties when circumstances favoured; there were many engagements major and minor; history was daily sown like a crop to be harvested in its season.

Having thought of history as a crop that was sown I am left with the image of sowing but the picture in my mind is not one of seeds flung from the hand of the husbandman; it is of heads flung from the missile-throwing machines on both sides. Heads! Human heads that have spoken, kissed, whistled, eaten, drunk, done all those things that only heads can do! Heads as missiles! The heads slung into Antioch by the Franks were the heads of Turks killed in battle but the heads slung out of Antioch by the Turks were not those of Franks; they were the heads of Syrian and Armenian Christians of Antioch.

Those Syrian and Armenian Christians of Antioch and the country roundabout, I know not quite how to think of them, how to hold them in my mind. Until 1085 Antioch had been part of Byzantium, but as the tide of Byzantium ebbed they found themselves stranded on a beach that belonged to Qilij-Arslan. Sometimes I think of them as being like those little shore birds that run on long legs, crying as they glean the tideline. They were never static, never inactive, those Christians of that place and that time, they filled in whatever unoccupied spaces of action they found. They were constantly going backwards and forwards between the Franks and the Turks: sometimes they spied on the Franks for the Turks; sometimes they spied on the Turks for the Franks. When the Franks were starving those busy Christians in the country around Antioch sold them provisions at what might be called Last Judgment prices which effectively sorted out those who could afford to live from those who could only afford to die. Those same Christians, when they found Turks in flight from an engagement with the understandably testy Franks, ambushed the Turks and so struck a rough balance in their dealings with both sides. They had no peace, those Christians, they had no rest, they were continually gleaning that shimmering tideline against a background of towering breakers. The churning of the times they lived in had imparted to them a motion they could not resist, they were compelled by forces beyond them to keep moving in all directions and to be incessantly busy in many ways.

There came a particular day that winter when the Franks ambushed the Turks who were planning to ambush them. We were told that seven hundred Turks died that day while the Franks had no losses whatever. It was a cold grey day, the tents and awnings of the Hidden Lion bazaar was snapping in the wind; it was one of those grey days, it was one of those winds when no matter how many people gather together each one of them looks utterly alone and too small under a sky that is far, far too big. Little leaning pitiful figures. The tax-collector that day was pacing with ostentatious self-importance, like a man who knows that people breathlessly await his words.

There came to Hidden Lion then Yaghi-Siyan riding on his horse, his bodyguard with him as always. They were followed by a mule-cart covered with a tent-cloth. Yaghi-Siyan rode clip-clopping on to the tiles with the bodyguard clip-clopping after him and the mule-cart rumbling behind. He wore a helmet and a mail shirt with a gold-worked green robe over it. One couldn’t tell whether he had been in the battle or not; he looked fresh and clean. He had a bow slung on his shoulder; I had never seen him carry a bow before; he looked as if at any moment he expected to have to fight or fly for his life. His face was wild with rage and (I thought) with despair. He looked all around him while his horse danced and tossed its head. (How strange, I thought, to be a horse; one might be carrying on one’s back anything at all to anything at all: chaos to order; betrayal to trust; defeat to victory; death to life.)

Everyone became silent, and in the silence there came on the wind snatches of singing from the Franks encamped by the Gate of the Dog. They were singing in Latin and the only words that came clearly in the gusting of the wind were: ‘Deus trinus et unus’, ‘God three together and one’.

‘Do you know what tongue they sing in?’ Yaghi-Siyan said to me.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘They are singing in Latin.’

‘Scholarly Jew!’ said Yaghi-Siyan. ‘And what do they sing?’

‘“God three together and one”,’ I said. ‘Those were the only words I could make out.’

‘“Three together and one”!’ said Yaghi-Siyan. ‘Which is it? Is it three or is it one?’

‘It is both three and one,’ I said. ‘The three are together in the one.’

‘How many gods do you worship, Jew?’ he said.

‘One,’ I said.

‘I also,’ he said. Still looking at me he said over his shoulder, ‘Bring Firouz here.’ One of the bodyguard rode off at a trot towards the Tower of the Two Sisters.

Everyone waited in silence. There had been no command for silence nor was Yaghi-Siyan, Governor though he was, a commanding presence. It was clear to everyone, however, that something of great power was commanding him. The faces that were turned towards him were looking at what was commanding him. The awnings flapped and fluttered, the green-and-gold banner carried by one of the bodyguard snapped in the wind. Mount Silpius, continually surprising in its mountainness, seemed itself surprised to find itself where it was, surprised to find that the present moment had indeed arrived. I cannot say less than I must but I dare not say more than is permitted; for the first time in this narrative it comes to me that words are images, and what is sacred cannot be imaged. Still there is the obligation of the witness: though the world should pass away, what has been seen has been seen; the voice that does not speak is denying God.

Yaghi-Siyan himself seemed to be snapping in the wind like the banner as he sat there on his horse in silence. The horse arched its neck, pawed with its hooves, dunged upon the tiles that at another time Yaghi-Siyan had taken off his shoes to walk upon.

The guard returned, Firouz riding beside him. Yaghi-Siyan said to Firouz, ‘Get down off your horse, please.’

Firouz dismounted, stood upon the tiles of Hidden Lion. The guard who had brought him took hold of the bridle of Firouz’s horse.

‘Firouz,’ said Yaghi-Siyan, ‘you have been a Christian, have you not?’

‘I bear witness that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is the messenger of God,’ said Firouz.

‘Yes, yes, we know that,’ said Yaghi-Siyan. ‘Now you are a Muslim. But you must tell me about the Christian god, the Three in One.’

‘What must I tell you?’ said Firouz.

‘You must tell me,’ said Yaghi-Siyan, ‘what this Three in One is. Is One the head and Two the body and Three the legs? What is this Three in One?’

‘One is the Father, Two is the Son, Three is the Holy Spirit,’ said Firouz.

‘Very good,’ said Yaghi-Siyan. ‘Here we are, you and I, upon Hidden Lion with its twisting serpents, contiguous with infinity: you are an Armenian, you have been a Christian and now you are a Muslim; I am only a simple Turk, I lack your experience in religious matters; I have always been a Muslim the same as I am now, I don’t know anything else. But you, having been a Christian, must know all about Christians — probably you can immediately recognize them when you see them. How is it with them, have they got lines upon their bodies dividing them into Spirit, Son, and Holy Father?’

‘Christians wear blue turbans,’ said Firouz.

‘Ah, yes!’ said Yaghi-Siyan. ‘Probably the blue signifies the Heaven that is waiting for those of them who are virtuous. In any case you will have no difficulty in knowing them on sight. And of course now that you have been living among Turkish Muslims you know very well what they look like, don’t you?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Firouz.

‘Show him a Turk,’ said Yaghi-Siyan to the cavalryman on the mule-cart.

The cavalryman lifted a corner of the cloth, put his hands into the cart, and lifted out a man’s head. He did not lift it up by the hair, he held it respectfully with both hands. The nose was smashed, the open eyes were covered with dirt, the face was broken and smeared with blood. I looked from the face to the mountain, from the mountain to the face.

‘This is the head of a Turk,’ said Yaghi-Siyan. ‘His name is Jhamil Muqtin. He was one of our bravest fighters, he was like magic with a horse, like magic with a bow. His body is not here, his body has been roasted and eaten by the Franks. They have slung his head over the wall with a stone-slinger. His wife, his two sons and his daughter have waited for his return from battle. His old mother has waited also. There are a hundred heads in this cart and there are hundreds more of our men dead. They are dead from treachery, they are dead because the Franks knew of our plans, they were lying in wait for us. We were betrayed by the Christians who live among us, Armenian and Syrian Christians. Now you must bring three hundred Christians to me here upon these twisting serpents. You will know the men by their blue turbans and the women by their blue headcloths. If you find Christians naked you will know the men by their uncircumcised members and you will know the women because they will be with the men. You will know the children because they will cry when you take the parents. I need these three hundred Christians urgently, I must send their heads over the wall to the Franks. They have sent me a hundred heads but as their god is three for one I must send them back three hundred.’

Bembel Rudzuk spoke and his voice seemed to come from a very small quiet place far away, as from a cleft in the rock of a distant mountain. ‘Your Excellency,’ he said, ‘as you speak those words you are standing on tiles inscribed with the names of Allah The Compassionate, Allah The Merciful.’

‘Yes,’ said Yaghi-Siyan, ‘and that is why I shall overlook what you have just now said. A second time you won’t be so lucky.’

Bembel Rudzuk came forward and knelt before Yaghi-Siyan. He took off his kaffiya, bared his neck, bowed his head. ‘Let my Muslim head then be the first of the three hundred,’ he said. ‘I cannot turn away, and it is better that I do not look upon what you are going to do.’

Having no sword with me I went up to Firouz who was standing as if in a daze and I drew his sword from its sheath. With it in my hand I stood over Bembel Rudzuk. ‘I prefer not to look upon the death of Bembel Rudzuk,’ I said. ‘Who kills him will have to kill me first.’

‘Devoted Jew!’ said Yaghi-Siyan. ‘No one is going to kill either of you. I give you this gift because of what you have shown me with your Hidden Lion. But you shall not be allowed to interfere with what is going to happen here on your pattern that is contiguous with infinity. That is why it is being done here, that the beheading of these three hundred traitors may also be contiguous with infinity, may go on for ever and ever until time will have an end.’ From Firouz’s girdle he removed the sheath of the sword and slid it over the blade as I held the weapon in my hand. ‘Keep this sword and remember me in time to come,’ he said. ‘Go now in peace, go up to the top of your tower and bear witness that this is also part of the pattern.’

Soldiers of the bodyguard came and led Bembel Rudzuk and me to the tower that stood on David’s Wheel. We climbed to the top, and when I looked down at the pattern it seemed for the moment not to have in it that motion that was always there; it seemed to be the frozen shards and fragments of a Law that was created unyieldingly hard and rigid and for ever broken. The red, the black, the tawny triangles were swarming with figures watching, figures waiting, staring eyes in staring faces. From the place above his shoulders where his head would have been I felt the tax-collector’s eyes on me. Tower Gate’s round face appeared in the crowd like the moon seen for a moment through the cloud-race of an angry sky. The Imam, the Nagid, and the Rabbi seemed to pass like sorrowing dark angels through that same sky. Ah! I thought, this would have been a good time to die; I ought to have killed Yaghi-Siyan when I stood before him with Firouz’s sword in my hand but I had not done it.

Neither Bembel Rudzuk nor I sought death again that day. I knew that my time was coming soon, I knew that I must be alert to recognize the time and the place so that my death might be the best possible, the most useful possible. But even as that thought moved through my mind it was hurried on its way by another thought coming behind it. This second thought asked whether it might not be only vanity and a striving after wind to want so much for one’s death; whether it might not be better to require nothing whatever of it or for it but simply to welcome it whenever and however it might come, to welcome it as one welcomes the stranger to whom one must always show hospitality.

As soon as I had taken in this second thought a wave of ease spread through me, a strong feeling that I had found the right way to be. With that feeling came an understanding that from then on every moment would be — indeed always had been — as the last moment. This wants to be made perfectly clear, it may be the only thing I have to say that matters; this idea has for me both the brilliance of the heart of the diamond of the universe and the inverse brilliance of the heart of the blackness in which that diamond lives: this moment that is every moment is always the last moment and it came into being with the first moment; it is that moment of creation in which there comes into being the possibility of all things and the end of all things; it is the blossoming jewel at the heart of the explosion, the calm quiet dawn at the centre of the bursting. This moment that is every moment — to see it whole is to synchronize one’s being with the whole of time, to be everywhere in it at the same time. It is to be with everything by letting go of everything. It is through this awareness that my present state of being has come about. It is associated with that purple-blue of indescribable luminosity of which I have spoken before.

There are not three hundred Christians gathered here on Hidden Lion; there are one hundred; Yaghi-Siyan has said that he will balance justice with mercy, he will do to these Christians only what those Christians outside the walls have done to the Turks whose heads are in the mule-cart. That a human being should in this fashion show mercy is to me an equal horror with the rest of what is happening. Once only I look at the faces of the Christians as they are herded on to the tiles, then I look away, I look at their feet.

Now at this moment and then at that moment, in this same moment that will continue for the duration of the universe, in this same luminosity of purple-blue, in this same heart of the diamond, I see the gathering of the Christians on Hidden Lion. The presentness of it, the nowness and for everness of it, is intolerable, and for this that is happening I curse God as Him, I curse God as It, that he made us, whether as He or as It. That he made us what we are, to sling heads over a wall from the outside to the inside and from the inside to the outside. This is what He has done with His omnipotence: this feeble masturbation in a dark and ill-smelling place.

And yet, so are we made and such is the action of the everything in this one moment that is every moment, that another thought flickers over and under my first thought: what style God has! What a truly godlike extravagance, to burst out all at once with a universe in which everything is going at once and humankind is let run with nothing to stop it from doing anything at all. And to make this running-loose creature with a mind that knows what it is doing and a soul in which Hell burns always and Heaven is grasped so rarely and so briefly that it lives in us as a continual yearning for what can never be held on to, for what must always be lost — what invention!

The sacred is not to be imaged, there is no image to put to what God is nor is there any reason to want an image of such a thing. The evil that he has created is also in its inexplicable way sacred and not to be described beyond a certain point. Suddenly are these long-legged shore birds, these gleaners of the tideline, netted. Suddenly, with their dark faces, their speechless mouths, their uncircumcised members, their frozenness into such time as there will be until the end of time.

That is as far as I shall go with these words and the images they bring. What happened, happened.

Afterwards the bodies are taken away in wagons. There remains of course the blood on the tiles, on the red and black and tawny triangles of Hidden Lion. It is darker than the tawny, darker than the red, lighter than the black. The same people who stood looking on while the Christians were being beheaded now stand looking at the blood. The butcher and his helper from the shop near by bring a bucket of sand, two buckets of water, a scrubbing brush.

‘No,’ says Bembel Rudzuk. ‘This blood is not to be washed away. It is now part of the pattern and it is obviously the will of Allah that it should be so.’

‘Perhaps you don’t remember,’ says the butcher, ‘but one of the tiles with blood on it is mine. My money is mortared into it and it is inscribed with the name of Allah The Truth, He whose existence has no change.’

‘I remember,’ says Bembel Rudzuk, ‘but this blood is not going to be washed away.’ He stands there with his arms folded on his chest. The butcher and the butcher’s helper look at him attentively, then walk away with their bucket of sand, their two buckets of water, and their scrubbing brush.

In twos and threes the people drift away. Still Bembel Rudzuk stands there like a man of stone. He and I have read the Holy Scriptures together, and I know that those verses of Ezekiel that are now in my mind must be in his mind as well:

Wherefore thus saith the Lord GOD:

Woe to the bloody city, to the pot

whose filth is therein, and whose filth

is not gone out of it! bring it out

piece by piece; no lot is fallen upon it.

For her blood is in the midst of her;

she set it upon the bare rock;

she poured it not upon the ground,

to cover it with dust; that it might

cause fury to come up, that vengeance

might be taken, I have set her blood

upon the bare rock, that it should not

be covered. Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD:

Woe to the bloody city!

After a time Bembel Rudzuk ceases to stand like a stone man, he begins to walk the boundaries of the square, then moves in a little, walking in progressively smaller squares, moving a little closer to the centre each time, walking slowly in concentric squares as if threading a labyrinth. When he reaches the tower he walks hexagonally around it, then walks from there outwards in concentric squares again to the outer limits of Hidden Lion. The tax-collector with his eyes that are elsewhere stands watching quietly with me. The sky is growing pale. Bembel Rudzuk and I go home; the tax-collector remains on Hidden Lion.

Bembel Rudzuk and I went up to the roof of his house and waited there for the day to come. It was unseasonably warm, the air was close and heavy, the morning seemed to hold its breath in the dull grey before-dawn light. In this light was something of that grey and rainy dawn in which I first had come to Suwaydiyya with Bembel Rudzuk. The port with its topography of morning, its long shadows, its low buildings, its boats rocking to the morning slap of the water on their sides, furled sails still heavy with night, crews moving slowly on their decks, the smell of cooking-fires — all this had without seeming to move grown smoothly bigger in my eyes in that particular way in which things reveal themselves when approached by sea, opening to the approacher more and more detail, more and more imminence of what is to come. And always, thus approaching, one feels the new day, the new place, coming forward to read the face of the approacher. Always the held breath, the questioning look of the grey morning.

‘I no longer have any questions that require answers,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘It is not in our power to know very much nor to understand very much. Perhaps the most we can hope for is to learn to encounter what comes without pissing ourselves.’ He said nothing for a while, then he said, ‘The heads of the Christians were slung over the wall but not the bodies. Do you know why?’

I knew why. Sometimes when the wind was blowing from the Franks to us I had smelled the smoke of their cooking. I listened to the twittering of sparrows, the crowing of cocks, I saw in my mind the blood on the tiles of Hidden Lion.

‘“And all as a garment will become old,”’ said Bembel Rudzuk,’ “and as a mantle thou wilt roll up them, as a garment also they will be changed …” This is the earth and the heavens being spoken of, the work of God’s hands, they will grow old and be folded up like a garment. You and I have read this together in the Epistle of Paul to the Hebrews in the New Testament of the Christians, but for me it is no longer a matter of words; I can feel it in the air, I can feel the fabric of the world and its time collapsing upon itself like the folds of a tired garment.’ Bembel Rudzuk stood there solidly in the grey light with his arms folded, his moustaches as heroic as ever, his bearing as upright; but he looked like a deserted village.

‘In the Quran also one reads of this folding up,’ he said. ‘This too we have read together, in Sura 81, Takwir, The Folding Up:

‘In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful

1. When the sun

(With its spacious light)

Is folded up;

2. When the starsbra

Fall, losing their lustre;

3. When the mountains vanish

(Like a mirage);

4. When the she-camels Ten months with young,

Are left untended;

(‘And you must know,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘that the camel being the jewel of the Arab’s eye and his special pet, the she camel almost come to her time is most especially precious; so when we speak of a time when such animals will be neglected we are speaking of the collapse of all things, the true and actual final folding up.)

‘5. When the wild beasts

Are herded together

(In human habitations);

(‘In this extremity,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘the animals will no longer be afraid of humans, the animals and the humans will be folded up together at the end of all things.)

‘6. When the oceans

Boil over with a swell;

7. When the souls

Are sorted out

(Being joined, like with like);

(‘I no longer know what to think about this matter of the sorting of souls,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘Is there more than one kind of soul, do you think? Is the soul of Yaghi-Siyan different from your soul and my soul? Wait, hear more before we talk.)

‘8. When the female (infant)

Buried alive, is questioned—

9. For what crime

she was killed;

(‘There have been,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘Arabs who buried their baby daughters alive; they didn’t want to have to provide for them or be burdened with protecting their honour. These are only words and one can speak them but if one thinks of the actuality then one must look at what is intolerable to look at. I am thinking now of your Abraham and Isaac who are Ibrahim and Isma’il in Muslim tradition. Never before have I dared to say aloud these words that I am going to say now: the fundamental flaw in God is that He will say that He requires the sacrifice of Isaac/Isma’il; the fundamental flaw in man is that he takes his knife in hand to do God’s bidding. This story of God’s testing of Abraham has become an easy thing to read, an easy thing to say in words, an easy point of reference; but if you let it become real in your mind then you have to look at a boy tied hand and foot by his father whose knife is at his throat. Think of it! There lies the boy trussed like an animal, he lies on the firewood that he has borne on his own back to the place where the fire will consume him when he has been murdered by his father whom he has trusted all his life. Murder in the name of God! And Abraham has no hesitation! He is completely willing to murder his son because a voice in his head has made him mad. If I had ever in my life come upon such a scene, if I had ever come upon such a madman with his knife upraised over a child I should have killed that man before God had a chance to speak again. Wouldn’t you? See it in your mind! Be that father and look down into the eyes of your son while you raise the knife. What are you at this moment that is one moment away from murder, from human sacrifice? Will you call yourself the hand of God? Why should Yaghi-Siyan not call himself the hand of God a hundred times over? Word of God! If God is everywhere then every word is the Word of God, Yaghi-Siyan’s word as well as Muhammad’s. Wait, listen to more of this Sura of the folding-up:)

‘10. When the Scrolls

Are laid open;

11. When the World on High

Is unveiled:

12. When the Blazing Fire

Is kindled to fierce heat;

13. And when the Garden

Is brought near;—

14. (Then) shall each soul know

What it has put forward.

‘Here I have been quoting verses of the Holy Quran and I cannot even properly call myself a Muslim,’ said Bembel Rudzuk: ‘I don’t believe in a Last Day that will be different from any other day; I believe that the Last Day is every day; I believe that the Garden and the Fire are in each of us every day of our lives and we are in one or the other or somewhere between the two depending on our actions. I believe that every soul knows very well from one moment to another what it has put forward — do I not know what I have put forward with this Hidden Lion that I have called up? Do I not know how far I have overstepped the bounds of what is permitted in one’s approach to the Unseen?’

‘Why do you keep saying “I”?’ I said. ‘Whatever has been done with Hidden Lion has been done by the two of us; was it not I who drew the first unit of the pattern on the stone?’

‘Ah!’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘You see! You are trying to share the burden of blame because you know that there is a burden of blame!’

I thought of Hidden Lion, of its tawny triangles, its red and its black but as soon as the triangles came into my mind they were covered first by blood then by the terrified feet of the hundred chosen for death by Firouz. What should I have done in his place? Useless to ask such a question — he did what he did that day, I did what I did, each of us in our own place. It is so very, very easy to live one day longer than one ought.

‘You don’t deny what I have just said,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘you don’t deny that we have overstepped the bounds.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t deny it. Everywhere there are patterns of tiles to be seen, most of them far more ambitious in their complexity and finish than Hidden Lion, but I think one may say that they were done in innocence.’

‘They were done without presumption,’ said Bembel Rudzuk; ‘they were done modestly and with no other purpose than that of ornamentation. They were done without intent to observe the Unseen, without intent to violate its privacy; they harmlessly adorn buildings, walls, floors; they were not made for the sole purpose of seeing the Unseeable. We have done that which ought not to be done although you are not to blame; it was I who asked you to make the design, I with my stupid ideas of sulphur and mercury and triangles, I with my greed for the Unseen. And yesterday the Unseen said, “Do you still pursue me with your tiles? I have shown you, have I net, twisting serpents, moving pyramids, disappearing lions; I have shown you the surge of Me that is like a river of power, and still you crave more; very well then, I will show you more.”’

‘Can you really believe that?’ I said. ‘Can you really believe that Hidden Lion has called down this terrible thing upon itself?’ Think,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘what we have done. We have made a provocation and an insult. We have used the names of God and the habitation of the Unseen and we have made a good-luck charm with our tiles. We have made an idolatry for ignorant people to whom prayer is only a kind of begging, we have put the rubbish of the seeable and the touchable between them and Allah, we have sped them on their way from any hope of the Garden, we have pointed them towards the Fire.’

‘Have we truly done so much evil?’ I said.

‘Only consider,’ said Bembel Rudzuk: ‘if the pattern of Hidden Lion is contiguous with infinity (and there can be no doubt of this, in our very souls we know it to be so) then everything about it is contiguous with infinity. If our action in making it was wrong (and we both know now that it was) then that wrong action is contiguous with infinity; its connexions extend to things and places we know not of, we cannot imagine the vastness of the web to which Hidden Lion is an entrance and a passageway.’

‘All things being contiguous,’ I said, ‘Hidden Lion can as well be an effect as a cause; it cannot be proved to be the beginning of a chain of evil.’

‘Sophistry cannot help us,’ said Bembel Rudzuk; ‘every action has its consequences and the consequences of the action of making Hidden Lion cannot be without evil.’

At that moment from the minaret there came the call of the mu’addhin. Bembel Rudzuk began his prayers and I drew a little apart from him and stood looking out over the city that I seemed to be approaching by sea in the grey dawn. Again I saw in my mind the terrified feet of the Syrian and Armenian Christians on the tawny, the red, and the black triangles and I wondered in what way any of what was happening could possibly have been willed by God in any of His or Its aspects. How far back would one have to go to find the cause from which this effect had arisen? All things being contiguous, one was driven back to the original bursting into being of the universe: immediately from that moment existed the possibility of everything that could possibly happen on this earth. From that moment two and two made four, and all else that could be until the end of time already was; on one or another, on a few or on many of the planes of virtuality and actuality that might at some time intersect, everything that could be already was. The choices that would have to be made by people who would not be born for thousands of millions of years were already forming with the galaxies and the nebulae, with the Virgin and the Lion. As far as I could see, the will of God was simply that everything possible would indeed be possible. Within that limitation the choice was ours, the reckoning His. And He was in us, one couldn’t get away from Him, that was the Fire of it, that was the Garden of it, at the centre of every soul and contiguous with infinity. The possibilities of choice were beyond all calculation and the probability of wrong choice so high as to be almost a certainty. Only God could think of such a game, and only humans would bother to play it.

Refreshed and desperate from my meditation I turned and saw another figure on the roof with us. My heart leapt in me; it was my young death. This was the very first time he had appeared to me since I had crossed the sea to come here. He was naked and he was standing by the parapet with his back to me but I recognized him at once. He was full-grown but there was that about the way he was standing that made me think of a child who cannot sleep or has had perhaps a bad dream and comes to be comforted. How my heart went out to him!

He turned to me, his face somehow obscure, not to be held in the eye. I looked to see if he had all his parts. He had, he was a complete man. He looked at me for a moment only, then he walked slowly to the stairs and was gone, his face still obscure in my mind, not to be recalled.