The Fire (14 page)

From Shahin, Charlot knew that the Tuareg tribes, known as drum groups, each was descended from a female progenitor. And each drum chief, often also a woman, kept the tribe’s sacred drum, believed to be endowed with mystic power.

The Tuareg, like those Sufi Janissaries who controlled most of the Ottoman lands, for hundreds of years had used their secret drum language to send signals across the vast expanses of their dominions. So powerful was this drum tongue that in lands that kept slaves, the drum itself was forbidden.

‘And these ancient mysteries of the Tuareg – the evil mouth and the veil – these are connected with your young son?’ Charlot asked.

‘You still cannot see him?’ Shahin said. Though his face bore no expression, Charlot could hear the thought:
Even when he must be so close by?

Charlot shook his head, then rubbed his hands over his face and ran his fingers through his red hair, seeking to stimulate his addled brain. He looked up at Shahin’s face, carved like an ancient bronze. Shahin’s golden eyes were trained intently upon him in the firelight. Waiting.

Forcing a small smile, Charlot said, ‘Tell me about him.
Perhaps it will help us to find him, like giving the scent of water to a thirsty camel in the desert. Your son is called Kauri. It’s an unusual name.’

‘My son was born on the Bandiagara Cliffs,’ he said. ‘Dogon country.
Kauri
is the Dogon word for
cowrie,
a marine mollusk indigenous to the Indian Ocean, a shell that we Africans have used as our monetary currency for thousands of years. But among the Dogon this small shell, the
kauri,
also bears deep meaning and power. It connects with the hidden meaning of the universe, for the Dogon symbolizing the source of both numbers and words. My wife chose this name for our child.’

When he saw Charlot’s dark blue eyes observing him in amazement, he added, ‘My wife – Kauri’s mother – was very young when we married but already she held great powers among her people,’ Shahin said. ‘Her name was Bazu – in the Dogon tongue it means “the female fire” – for she was one of the Masters of Fire.’

A blacksmith!

Charlot felt a shock in grasping just what this revelation meant. Blacksmiths everywhere throughout the desert lands and elsewhere were an ostracized profession, though it was true that they bore enormous powers. They were called Masters of Fire, for they created weapons, pottery, tools. They were feared, for they possessed secret skills and spoke a secret language known only to themselves; they commanded both hidden techniques of the initiate and diabolical powers attributed to ancient spirits.

‘And this was your wife? Kauri’s mother?’ said Charlot in amazement. ‘But how did you come to meet or to marry such a woman?’
And without my knowing it!
Charlot felt weakened with exhaustion by these revelations.

Shahin was silent for a moment, his golden eyes clouded. At last he said, ‘It had all been foretold, just as it came to
pass – both my marriage and the birth of our son, as well as my wife Bazu’s early death.’

‘Foretold?’ said Charlot. His creeping terror had returned in force.

‘Foretold by
you,
Al-Kalim,’ said Shahin.
I foretold it. But I cannot remember it.

Charlot stared at him. His mouth was dry with fear.

‘This is why, when I found you three months ago in the Tassili, I felt the shock of loss,’ said Shahin. ‘Fifteen years ago, when you were but a boy of Kauri’s age just at the brink of manhood, you
saw
what I have just told you. You said I would produce a son who must be kept hidden, for he would be descended from a Master of Fire. He would be trained by those who possess great wisdom of the ancient mysteries – those mysteries that lie at the heart of the chess set we know as the Montglane Service, a secret that is believed to hold the power to create or to destroy civilizations. When al-Jabir ibn Hayyan designed the chess set one thousand years ago, he called it the Service of the
Tarik’at
– the Sufi path, the Secret Way.’

‘From whom did your son learn these mysteries?’ asked Charlot.

‘At the age of three, when Kauri’s mother died, he was raised under the tutelage and protection of the great Bektashi Sufi
Pir,
the Baba Shemimi. I’ve learned that when the Turks attacked Janina in January, my son was called upon to help rescue an important chess piece held by Ali Pasha. When Janina fell, Kauri was headed with an unknown companion for the coast. This was the last we have heard of him.’

‘You must tell me what you know of the history of the service,’ said Charlot. ‘Tell me now – before we descend the mountain at dawn to find your son.’

Charlot sat staring into the fire, watching the molten heat as he tried to feel his way within himself. And Shahin began his tale.

The Tale of the Blue Man

In the year 773, by the Western calendar, al-Jabir ibn Hayyan had been hard at work for eight years. With hundreds of skilled artisans assisting, he was creating the chess Service of the
Tarik’at
for the first caliph of the new city of Baghdad, al-Mansur. No one knew of the mysteries contained within it except Jabir himself. They were based upon his great Sufi alchemical work,
The Books of the Balance,
dedicated to his late shaikh Ja’far al-Sadiq, the true father of Shi’a Islam.

Jabir believed he was nearly finished with his masterpiece. But in the summer of that year, the caliph al-Mansur was surprised by the arrival of an important Indian delegation from the mountains of Kashmir, a deputation that ostensibly had been sent to open avenues of trade with the newly established ’Abbasid dynasty at Baghdad. In fact, these men were on a special mission whose purpose no one might ever have guessed. They had brought with them a secret of ancient wisdom, disguised beneath the veil of two gifts of modern science. As a scientist himself, al-Jabir was invited for the presentation of these treasures. This experience would change everything.

The first gift was a set of Indian astronomical tables that recorded the movements of the planetary bodies over the past ten thousand years – celestial events that were scrupulously recorded in the oldest of Indian sagas, such as the Vedas. The second gift was a puzzlement to everyone but the official court chemist, al-Jabir ibn Hayyan.

These were ‘new numbers’ – new to the West. Among other innovations, these Indian numbers had positional value, that is, instead of two lines or two stones representing the number ‘two’ if placed side by side, they represented one plus ten, or ‘eleven.’

More clever still was a place-holding figure that we now call a cipher – from Arabic
sifr,
meaning ‘empty’ – and
which Europeans call a zero. These two numerical innovations – today called ‘Arabic’ numerals – would revolutionize Islamic science. Though they would not reach Europe via North Africa for another five centuries, they had already existed in India for more than one thousand years.

Jabir’s excitement knew no bounds. He instantly understood the connection between these astronomical tables and the new numbers, in providing deep and complex calculation. And he understood both with respect to another ancient Indian invention that already had been embraced by al-Islam: the game of chess.

It took al-Jabir two more years, but in the end he was able to build these Kashmiri mathematical and astronomical secrets into the chess Service of the
Tarik’at.
Now the chess set would contain not only Sufi alchemical wisdom and the Secret Path, but also
awa’il
– ‘in the beginning,’ or pre-Islamic sciences – the ancient wisdom upon which it all was based from the earliest times. It would be, he hoped, a guidebook for those in coming ages who might seek the Way.

In October of 775, only months after Jabir had displayed the service before the Baghdad court, Caliph al-Mansur died. His successor, Caliph al-Mahdi, hired the powerful family of Barmakids to be his viziers, prime ministers of his reign. Originally a Zoroastrian priestly family of fire worshippers from Balkh, the Barmakids were only lately converted to Islam. Jabir convinced them to revive
awa’il,
the ancient sciences, by bringing experts from India to translate the earliest Sanskrit texts into Arabic.

At the very height of this brief revival, Jabir dedicated his
Hundred and Twelve Books
to the Barmakids. But the ulama, religious scholars, and the chief councils of Baghdad protested. They wished to return to the fundamentals by burning all such books and destroying the chess set that, in its depiction of animal and human forms, seemed close to idolatry.

The Barmakids, though, recognized the importance of the service and all its symbols. They saw it as an
imago mundi,
a world image, a representation of how multiplicity is cosmically generated from Unity – from the One.

The very design of the board replicated some of the earliest structures that had been dedicated to the mystery of transformation of spirit and matter, heaven and earth. Among these was the design of the Vedic and Iranian fire altars – even of the great Ka’ab itself, which existed before Islam, built by Abraham and his first son, Ishmael.

Fearing that such a powerful record of wisdom might be destroyed for secular or political reasons, the Barmakid family arranged with al-Jabir to smuggle it to a safe place: to Barcelona, on the sea close to the Basque Pyrenees. There, they hoped that the Moorish governor Ibn al-Arabi, himself a Sufi Berber, might protect it. It was just in time, for the Barmakids themselves fell from power soon after, along with al-Jabir.

It was Ibn al-Arabi of Barcelona who would send the chess set, only three years after receiving it, over the mountains to the court of Charlemagne.

That is how the greatest tool that ever united the ancient wisdoms of the East came to enter the hands of the first great ruler of the West – from whose control it has never truly been relinquished over these past one thousand years.

Shahin paused and studied Charlot in the waning light of the fire, which had burned down to reddish coals. Though Charlot sat upright and cross-legged on the ground, his eyes remained closed. It was nearly dark within the cave now; even the horses were asleep. Just outside the entrance the full moon cast a silvery blue pallor upon the snow.

Charlot opened his eyes and regarded his mentor with an expression of great attentiveness – familiar to Shahin for it
had often presaged one of the young man’s prophetic insights – as if he were straining to see something partly hidden behind a veil.

‘Sacred wisdom and secular power have always been in conflict, have they not?’ Charlot said, as if feeling his way. ‘But it is the
fire
that seems to me especially haunting. Jabir was the father of Islamic alchemy. Fire must be counted the essential ingredient in that process. And if his own protectors at Baghdad, the Barmakids, were descended from Zoroastrian priests or magi, surely their ancestors had once maintained the fire altars with their eternal flame. The word that exists in nearly every tongue, that designates all of these trades – the blacksmith, the shaman, the cook, the butcher, as well as the priest who performs the sacrifice and burns the offering on the altar – all the works in sacrifice and fire that in ancient times were one. This word is
Mageiros
: the Magus, the Grandmaster, the ‘Thrice-Great’ Master of the Mysteries.

‘These fire altars, just like the Indian numbers, the astronomical tables, the
awa’il
sciences you spoke of – like the game of chess itself – all originated in northern India, in Kashmir. But what connects them all together?’

‘I hope your gift can answer that question for us,’ said Shahin.

Charlot regarded him soberly, this man whom he regarded as his only father. ‘Perhaps I’ve lost that gift,’ he said at last, the first time he’d truly admitted the idea, even within the confines of his own mind.

Shahin shook his head slowly. ’Al-Kalim, you know that your coming was foretold among our peoples. It was written that one day a
nabi
or prophet would come from the Bahr al-Azraq – the Azure Sea – one who could talk with spirits and follow the
Tarik’at,
the mystic path to knowledge. Like you, he would be a
za’ar,
one who has fair skin, blue eyes,
and red hair; he would be born beneath the eyes of the ‘goddess,’ the figure painted on the Tassili cliffs that my people call the White Queen. For eight thousand years she has waited – for you are the instrument of her retribution, just as it was foretold. It is written:
I will rise again like a phoenix from the ashes on the day when the rocks and stones begin to sing…and the desert sands will weep bloodred tears…and this will be a day of retribution for the earth…

‘You know what has been foretold of you, and what you have foreseen about others,’ Shahin added. ‘But there is one thing no man can ever know – one thing that no prophet, regardless how great, can see for himself. And that is his
own
destiny.’

‘Then you believe that whatever has affected my vision actually may have to do with my own future?’ said Charlot, surprised.

‘I think one man can lift that veil,’ Shahin replied. ‘We go to seek him tomorrow in the Rif. His name is Mulay ad-Darqawi, a great shaikh
.
It is he whom they call the Old Man of the Mountain.’

All things are hidden in their opposites – gain in loss, gift in refusal, honour in humiliation, wealth in poverty, strength in weakness…life in death, victory in defeat, power in powerlessness, and so on. Therefore, if a man wish to find, let him be content to lose…

– Mulay al’Arabi ad-Darqawi,
Rasa’il

The Bu-Berih Hermitage

The Rif Valley, Morocco

The Old Man of the Mountain – Mulay al-’Arabi ad-Darqawi, the great shaikh of the Shadhili Sufi order – was dying.
He would soon be far beyond this veil of illusion. He had expected death for many months – indeed, had welcomed it.