Assassins - Ian Watson & Andy West (2 page)

Dazed and high on reaction to shock, Jafar
thanked the true Imam and God profusely. On that centuries-old
thread, his sight had hung.

Sensing that danger had passed, Ali knelt by
his comrade.

Jafar failed to steady his shaking hands, as
he unlatched and opened the inner casket. Inside were two further
lids, covered with embroidered red velvet. One was labelled
‘
life
’, the other, ‘
death
’.

“They’re both here!” rejoiced Ali.

Jafar took a pen from his top pocket and
flipped open the
life
lid. A row of hand-blown bottles in
greenish glass lay snug in padded beds. Clear liquid within them
reflected back glimmers of torchlight. The bottles appeared to be
sealed with a honey-coloured wax.

More cautiously, he peeked into
death
.
It looked no different, except that those bottles were sealed with
black wax.

Jafar was tense with passion. “Behold the
gift of the Assassins, the gift of God,” he whispered.

“Allah Akbar,” responded Ali reverently. He
reached forward, clearly intent on grasping one of those delicate,
fascinating vessels, holding water that could save or damn entire
populations.

The moment shattered.

Jafar grabbed the young man’s arm.
“
No
! We don’t know whether the seals are fully intact!”

Ali snatched back his hand and leapt away,
fear spilling from his eyes.

“Go back,” shouted Jafar. “Get the gloves and
medical cases. The medium-sized aluminium ones should do.”

As the echoes of that gunshot died away, Jafar felt
nearer to heaven, and powerful. By way of their ancient brethren,
whom only the weight of the Mongol hordes had been able to humble,
God had granted them the gift of an ultimate weapon: intricate
essences bequeathed from the very first global conflict.

According to the most persuasive
interpretation of their secret writings, the ingenuity of the
Assassins had produced something beyond their own wildest dreams
and nightmares, the use of which the Assassins themselves couldn’t
possibly have optimised or controlled, all those centuries ago.

Unlike now…

Now the time was ripe. A black tide would
devour their enemies as the
water of death
swept away the
very foundations of Sunni and Christian and heathen civilisations
alike, thus revealing the golden grains of the one true people.

Mahmoud was in heaven now. The gunshot that
had sent him there celebrated his sacrifice and the future victory.
Had anyone else in these mountains heard the thundering of the
shot, and wondered? Perhaps, perhaps not. Let the world pay no
further attention for twenty years or more…!

Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Studies, Cambridge, Massachusetts:
April

From her office window, Abigail Leclaire admired
swathes of tulips amid the Spring greenery of Radcliffe Yard. The
peaceful oval was flanked by modest buildings in old red brick,
watched over by their ordered rows of windows. Those could almost
be houses; like an academical village, to use Thomas Jefferson’s
phrase.

Sadly, in the Fall, her year as a stipendiary
fellow would finish and she’d need to confront the future. Her
original plan of reclaiming her teaching post for freshman history
back in Canada, at Montreal’s McGill University, would no doubt
cause a big problem for Terry. Well, her spirit yearned for
something better, something more exciting. Anyhow, the Fall was
still far off.

Her first book,
The
Medieval
Woman
, based on her doctoral thesis, had been well received;
and her application for one of the fifty annual stipends of
$60,000, plus project expenses, had to her joy succeeded.
Radcliffe, once a women’s college and now part of Harvard, prided
itself on matters female, as the huge holdings of old cookbooks in
its Shlesinger Library bore witness; though Abigail never mentioned
that
to most men, in case they got a wrong impression about
female scholarship.

Just as Terry may have gotten the wrong
impression of her?

In theory Radcliffe no longer prioritised
women’s issues, but the theme of her project application couldn’t
have harmed her chances, especially these days:
Troubadours and
Arab Women Poets: the Gentling of Europe
.

Her premise was that the poets of al-Andalus,
the Arab name for the south of Spain which they’d ruled, greatly
influenced the troubadours of southern France, not least in a new
sensitivity to male-female relationships and emotions; thus respect
and politeness and courtly love were born – and Queen Eleanor of
Aquitaine groomed her somewhat thuggish knights to become
chivalrous. More generally, Arabic culture mellowed Christian
Europe, especially regarding attitudes to women, even as militant
Christians were gearing up to drive the Arabs out of Spain and
destroy Islamic civilisation there.

Her own angle was that the
women
poets
of al-Andalus, the ‘poetisas’, played a major role in the gentling
process, their work included in the many poems from al-Andalus that
were translated into Provençal. Though few women authors in Arab
Spain were famous – due to a general lack of opportunity much
bemoaned by Arab intellectuals at the time – one historian had
listed more than forty poetisas. Unfortunately much of their work
appeared to have been lost. Yet there were stars such as Walladah
bint al-Mustakfi of Córdoba, or the renowned Fatima, who was also a
rare book collector
par excellence
on behalf of Caliph Hakam
II, a ruler who’d devoted his life to establishing public
libraries.

Abigail was determined to make a case for the
poetisas, and Harvard’s Centre for Middle Eastern Studies had texts
in its library which scholars had scarcely yet examined.

True, the topic was quite specialised and
mightn’t result in a second
book
as such, but at least a
monograph of 50 or 60 pages for an academic journal; and who knows
what she might yet find?

Having only just started to learn Arabic, she
reluctantly acknowledged this was a hurdle, but she relished
challenges. Unfortunately, so far, Arabic seemed to be largely
eluding her.

Terry had once said she needed ‘impossible’
challenges! What made him say that?

She’d been coming at the subject from the
French side, being from Montreal and raised bilingually. That first
book of hers might more accurately have been titled
The French
Medieval Woman
! She could read medieval French easily and cope
with medieval Provençal too, nor was her Spanish bad after long
holidays in Mexico; just as well, considering the amount of
scholarly works in Spanish about the various Arab Emirates and
Caliphates of al-Andalus.

Also, handily, Boston’s Roxbury district had
become home a few years back to the most expensive mosque in the
North-Eastern United States. Promoted by the Islamic Society of
Boston and costing $24 million, it was built on city land sold at a
fraction of market value, to help create a centre for moderation
and dialogue as well as a place of prayer. Clerics and staff there,
especially her friend Walid, helped her with Arabic translations
and interpretations of religious poetry. Harvard itself was
particularly keen on intellectual outreach to Islam and the Muslim
community. A long-standing programme of outreach had been set in
place after the 9/11 acts of terrorism.

Only a couple of weeks ago a reporter from
the
Boston Globe
, a guy with a goofy grin and ringletty
hair, who’d been hanging around the mosque, had more or less
kidnapped her into a brief interview about her interest. What was
his name? Paul Something. Summers, that was it. He was into Islamic
outreach, at least for the moment. She’d told him about her work,
since the
Globe
was a prestigious newspaper, thought there
was nothing about her in his subsequent story. Probably much too
fringe; she presumed reporters liked stuff they could manipulate
into drama, or at least into this week’s simple myths and
messages.

And Terry had lately accused
her
of
being manipulative!
On top of earlier counts of being
idealistic to the point of naivety, as well as obsessive. To her
own mind she was simply enthusiastic and committed; an idea could
capture and invigorate her. As for Terry, he couldn’t commit to
anything, so perhaps the commitment of others frightened him. And
it was completely beyond her how one could be manipulative and
naive at the same time!

There was a loud knock on her office
door.

“Come,” she called.

A man, maybe in his early thirties, very
short blond hair, blue-eyed, clean-shaven, dark blue suit and lilac
shirt, open-necked. He smiled in a briskly professional way.

“Dr Leclaire? Abigail Leclaire?”

“That’s me.”

“My name’s Jack Turner.” He produced ID. A
photo of him. His name. And above those: US Immigration &
Customs Enforcement.
www.ice.gov
.

That was the outfit that targeted illegal
immigrants. And kept watch on foreign nationals too? Back in Canada
last year there’d been an outcry in the press about a guy with dual
Iraqi-Canadian nationality – wasn’t that it? – whom, yes, ICE had
arrested in New York when he’d briefly visited there. ICE accused
him of being a terrorist sympathiser and promptly put him on a
plane to the Middle East. She remembered a headline:
The ICEman
Cometh
. Now the ICEman had come calling on her.
Why in
hell’s name?

“I think you have the wrong Leclaire,” she
said frostily.

“
I
don’t think so. May we talk?”

Was this intrusion because she frequently
visited the Roxbury mosque? It was unfortunately true that the
mosque was linked to controversy. There’d been stories in the
Boston Globe
fingering the
original
founder of the
Islamic Society of Boston as an al-Qaeda fund-raiser. Two
former
ISB trustees were also Islamist hotheads. Three
apparently bad apples in a rather big barrel. Or
allegedly
bad apples. Was
she
now tainted too?

These days in the States, it seemed one could
end up in trouble for very bizarre reasons supposedly connected
with national security; farewell, Land of Liberty!

But Jack Turner completely surprised her by
saying, “You just had a little piece published in the on-line
American
Annals of Medieval History
, about some old
stuff you found in the Harvard library.” From his pocket he
produced a printout. “A Lost Poetisa of al-Andalus.”

Abigail well remembered her excitement when she came
across two pieces of paper, folded up in the back of an early
printed chapbook of Provençal verse such as were sold in medieval
street-markets. Each paper was in the hand of a different scribe,
evidently no connection between them. The first sheet contained a
fragmentary account of what Abigail took to be an outbreak of
plague in Provence, with an odd comment scrawled at the bottom:
Hospitaller Have Pity
. The second was the gem, a torn scrap
from a poem. Although penned in Provençal script, it was
actually ascribed
on the sheet to Safiyya bint Yusuf
al-Ballisiyya. This poetisa lived in Granada in the early
14
^th
century, when the Alhambra palace complex was being
completed. Only one other poem by her survived. Though the early
14
^th
was a bit late to affect the original troubadours,
whose tradition was in decline as well as under attack from the
Dominican Inquisition trying to stamp out heresy, the 1320s saw a
revival in Toulouse.

Abigail had no desire to touch material
proffered by someone from a spooky agency such as ICE, so she
quickly accessed that same item at
www.amh.edu
. There was the fragment in medieval
Provençal, followed by her own translation:

…
mort
se cofla, e de riba sort
mentre l'agla forta
qui molt leisons ensenha
d'amont a bas agaita
per la vezion jutjar
que fem de la vertat
abans lo terme acabat

…
death
swells and overflows
while the strong eagle
teacher of many lessons
watches down from high
with the vision to judge
what we make of the truth
before our term is ended

Little enough! Yet accompanied by a longish
comment about the female poets of al-Andalus, it made the on-line
AAMH
. And somehow attracted the attention of the US
Immigration and Customs Enforcement…? Uninvited, Jack Turner sat in
the black leather swivel chair opposite her desk, twin to her
own.

“This may be a long shot,” he said, “but I
wonder what the phrase ‘eagle teacher’ might suggest to you?”

“Just those two words, out of context? That
sounds to me more like a native American medicine-man rather than
anything connected with an early medieval Arab woman’s poem!”

“I wasn’t thinking Redskins.”

“Native Americans,” she corrected him.

He just stared hard at her. “What does
eagle
evoke to you?”

“The Eagle has landed,” she replied, “on the
Moon. I dunno, the bald eagle on the Great Seal of the US
government. Endangered species,” she added.

“The US government is an endangered species?”
he enquired.

“I didn’t mean that. There’s no punctuation
of course, but there
is
a line-break between
eagle
and
teacher
,” she pointed out tartly.

He ignored this. “If not Redskins, how about
greenbacks? You may have noticed there’s an eagle on every US
Federal Reserve currency bill.”

“I don’t
study
money, I spend it.”

“60,000 good US dollars. Your stipend. I
know. What’s
Eagle Teacher
in Arabic?”

“I’ve no idea.”