Persepolis

Judith Tarr

A haunted place, a prophet in search of revelation, a spirit of fire.

God is great! God is great! There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Prophet of God!

The great words rang in the empty places. Even the hawk of the air was still, as if in homage to them.

Hasan, Sabah’s son, of everywhere and nowhere, but most recently of Persia, knelt and bowed and stood on the broad floor of the desert, walled in pillars like the bones of giants, and prayed for revelation. All that he had had till now was the dizziness of fasting, the cry of the hawk, and the hammer that was the sun. That made him fancy that he had seen a living shape in the shadow of a pillar, a shape with a face like a human creature’s, but eyes clear green like a cat’s.

“Allah protects me,” he said. He swayed on his knees. The pillars swayed with him. This was a city once, this place of stones and solitude, and these pillars had held up a roof of gold. He saw it sometimes in the night as he kept vigil over his prayers, splendors of gold and jeweled brilliance, carpets, hangings, carven images on the walls and set atop the pillars: lions, bulls, eagles, great beasts out of stories. And people—ghosts or spirits of the waste, tall, hawk-faced, bearded, silk-clad men, and sleek, gliding, smooth-faced personages who were not women yet not men either, and sometimes, shy in a shadow, a slender figure wrapped in veils, with great dark eyes. There were princes and slaves and every rank between; and above them all one in a tall crown, whom they worshiped on their faces as if he had been a god.

All dead. All gone. He saw that in the dark before dawn, when his soul was at the ebb and his prayers were lost in silence: the silken people fled, the demons in bronze hurtling in, and the flames leaping up, soaring to heaven.

It was terrible, it was beautiful, a sacrifice of fire. The one who led it was fire himself, hot-gold armor, hot-gold hair, and he laughed as he ran, streaming flame through the gilded passages. Sometimes Hasan fancied that he met the conqueror’s eyes, and they were odd, mismatched, one dark, one light; and he was more truly alive than any man who walked the living earth.

Dreams. Hasan lay on his back. He had no memory of falling. The sun hung low, casting the shadows of pillars across the broad stone floor.

He was old in fasting and in abstinence. From youth he had belonged to God; in his manhood he knew what he was in the world, and that was one of the great who walked in shadows. But this time maybe he had gone too far. His bones were as light as reeds, his flesh thin parchment stretched over them. The tent he had pitched in the shade of a great carved stair, the water he had fetched from the spring to which God had guided him, were a world’s width away.

It was Ramadan. He could not drink till after sunset. He would be dreaming again before that; then the dead would take his soul away. They were hungry, the dead, with their ghostly wine and their strengthless fire.

He sighed. He did not want to die; but if Allah willed it, then he must accept.

“That is nonsense,” said the air.

He was far gone indeed. He neither started nor went for his knife.

The air had a clear voice, sharp and rather cold, and hands that took him up with effortless strength. It had no substance that he could see.

“Are you a demon?” he asked it.

It returned no answer. He was flying: wind on his cheeks, sun in his eyes, a blur of pillars, sand, sky.

“Do you know the name of Allah?” he demanded. That was bold to foolhardiness, as high up as he was, and far to fall if the demon dropped him and fled shrieking from the Name.

The hands held fast. The air, it seemed, had fallen mute. He sighed. “Ifrit,” he said. “Spirit of air.” The thread of his soul stretched thin. He slid down into the dark.

oOo

Water murmured. Leaves whispered. Hasan woke slowly.

If this was paradise, then paradise was a subtler thing than any book told of. A single tree, a spring bubbling from its roots, a little sward of grass and flowers, and beyond it a darkness that was a cave’s mouth.

He was stiff, but when he rose, his knees did not buckle. The light upon him was moonlight. Full moon: half of Ramadan gone, half still to endure. He stooped to drink from the spring. The water was cold and clean. There was something beside it. A cloth, and on it a loaf of bread.

He blessed the bread in Allah’s name. It did not crumble into dust but remained bread, fresh and still warm from the baking. He ate sparingly, with the restraint of one who has fasted often and long. He drank again from the spring. Then he prayed, blessing the God Who kept him from fear.

This was not the ruined city that the people round about called Jamshid’s Throne and the learned sages named Persepolis. It was nowhere that he knew of. The sky was the sky he remembered, the air was desert air, sweetened with the scents of the oasis. The cavern sheltered nothing but silence.

Hasan returneed to the tree and the grass and the spring. “Spirit!” he called. “Ifrit!”

The air did not stir. The moon stared down.

“Ifrit,” said Hasan, “in Allah’s name, show yourself to me.”

“What is your Allah?”

Hasan whirled about. Shadow stirred beneath the tree.

He could discern no shape, but in it was a faint green gleam of eyes. “You know not Allah?”

“I know nothing,” the shadow said. “I am nothing. I am air and empty words.”

“And hands,” he said, “and wings to carry us through the air.”

“No wings,” said the shadow.

He essayed a step toward it. It melted into the treetrunk.

“Ifrit?” he asked.

It was gone. No call or command could bring it back.

oOo

Water from the spring and bread from the air brought back his strength. When day came, he searched out the cavern. It was threefold, and the innermost was a wonder: a pool of warm and ever-flowing water, in which, giving thanks to God, he washed his body clean. By night he slept in the outer cavern, which presented him with his own blankets and his meager belongings and a single lamp that never emptied of oil. Bread appeared again, with dates and figs and one sweet fragrant apple from the gardens of Damascus. There was no mistaking it; such apples grew nowhere else.

But he was not in or near Damascus. When on the third day he mustered strength to climb the crag that rose beyond the cave and to take the path that wound down from it, he found himself on a hillock over the ruined city, and the court of the pillars before him, where he had thought that he would die. And when he went down, it was as it had been when he left it; and when he went back, the cave was undisturbed, the spring flowing as it always had, and the tree whispering in the wind off the crag.

There was no such crag behind Jamshid’s Throne. And yet, when he walked upon it, it was as real as his own flesh, as solid as the stones of the fallen city. Neither prayer nor the name of Allah altered it.

One must accept; one must not question. Allah had preserved the least of His servants through a spirit who professed not to know His name. The least of His servants offered due thanks and pursued his prayers in peace, undisturbed by man or beast or spirit of the air.

Yet at times he thought that he felt eyes on him; sensed a movement just out of sight, a breath drawn where no breath should be. It frightened him no more now than it ever had. Fear was the enmity of a prince, the hatred of a caliph, the malice of a sultan in the courts of Cairo or Damascus or Baghdad. Fear was a thing of men and cities. Here in the clean desert, there was nothing to fear but death; and death was an old friend.

“Death is my servant,” he said of a night, when the lamp burned bright and the stars burned cold. “I shall teach men to bow to him.”

“And through him to you?”

This time he did not try to pursue the shadow. It hovered out of the lamp’s reach. It had a shape, maybe. A gleam that might have been eyes. A curve that might possibly have been a shoulder.

“No,” he said to it. “I do nothing for myself.”

“But,” said the shadow, “I hear you thinking. You think that many men come to you and call you master. You ran away from them. But you will go back. You have found a place for them, a mountain and a garden, and you will take it and be lord of it and forge knives for the ones who follow you.. Then they will use those knives in the name of your Faith.”

He shivered. But he said calmly, “You are a perceptive spirit.”

“There is nothing else for me to be,” said the ifrit.

“Are you bound here?” he asked it.

“No,” said the ifrit, but slowly.

“Then why do you stay here?”

“I do not remember,” the ifrit said.

Hasan opened his mouth, but shut it again. The shadow wavered, but it did not flee, not yet.

“I am empty,” it said.

“Of course,” said Hasan. “You do not know Allah.”

“Is he someone I should know?”

Hasan settled more comfortably. Here was a gift from the All-Merciful: a spirit to bring to the truth.

The ifrit, being deathless and, it seemed, unburdened with flesh, seemed content to listen nightlong. Hasan’s voice gave out toward morning; he had by then intoned nine-and-twenty surahs of the Koran, and begun another, and he finished it in a whisper. Then perforce he fell silent.

“That is very interesting,” the ifrit said. And went away.

oOo

That day he was alone. He prayed, silently. He pondered what he had come to this place to ponder: the world and its follies, and the nations of infidels, and the revelation that was taking shape here in his stony solitude.

Faith alone was not enough. In pure spirits—in the ifrit that attended him—it might suffice. But men were dross as well as spirit, and they lacked eyes to see and ears to hear. Even where they had both, still they resisted. Then they turned against the Faith and its faithful, and. thwarted it with clear will and malice. For them, one punishment was fitting, and that was death.

The Sword of Allah he would not be. A sword was too bright a thing. He would be a knife in the dark, a whisper in the shadows. Where sweet reason had failed and true faith had fallen, he would teach through fear. Men—and princes above all—would learn then the truth of God, and serve it in firm conviction, for if they fell short of it, they would die.

It was a pure thing, a simple thing, a truth and a certainty. It filled him with joy. Had he had voice, he would have sung.

oOo

In the evening the ifrit came back. He had been expecting it. The lamp was lit, his supper eaten. There had been honey for the bread, which soothed his throat remarkably.

The ifrit sat closer to the light this time. Yes, that was a shoulder, and that an arm, and that, perhaps, a knee. It seemed almost to have substance, as moonlight will; and it was as white as the moon’s light, and nigh as bright.

He had begun to cherish a suspicion. He did not try to confirm it It was shy still, this spirit. When he made an unwise motion, reaching too suddenly for the water in its flask, the ifrit flickered out of his sight. It came back in a little while, when he had begun to think that it would not, but it was wary, like a wild thing, and like a wild thing it watched him, eyes gleaming green. He kept very still except for his voice, which God or the pause had given new strength.

As before, when his voice failed, the ifrit went away. And as before, at evening it came back. There was honey again with the bread, and apples, and a decoction of herbs and sweetness that soothed his throat. This time once more the spirit moved closer. It had a body, shaped in moonlight, and it wore a cloak, unless that were its hair: a wonderful color, dark red like the wine that was forbidden the Faithful, through which shone the white glimmer of its limbs. As he chanted the holy verses, he darted glances, seeking to pierce the veil of shadow and of red-dark cloak.

Almost, at length, he faltered.

Ifrit, no. But ifritah certainly, she-spirit of the people of air. Once he was sure of it, there was no mistaking it; her voice though low was sweet, and the shape of her was never a male’s.

He said nothing of it, not then and not after she had gone wherever she went in the dark before dawn. And when she came back, he was able at last to see what face she wore. She was almost in the light, almost close enough to touch. He heard her breathe. He saw the curve of her cheek, the arch of her brow. She was not beautiful as mortal women were. Her face was carved clean and fierce, like a knife in the sheath or the moon in Ramadan. It was beauty as spirits knew it, nothing human in it at all. And that was her hair, that wonderful cloak, and she was naked under it, as unaware of herself as an animal.

He would not vex that innocence. Not this night. He sang the last Surah, and spoke the words of Faith to seal it, the Name of God and the name of His Prophet. And then he fell silent.

The ifritah waited with the patience of the deathless. At length, when still he said nothing, she said, “You may go on.”

“That is the end of it,” he said.

She frowned. Her eyes were as green as ever, and as inhuman as a cat’s. “Is there no more at all?”

“There are,” he said, “the prayers that one should say.”

“Teach them,” said the ifritah.

He taught her the prayers and the prostrations, five for each day that passed under the eye of Allah. And then he must teach her why it was that one bowed toward Mecca—once she had understood what that was, and where—and from that it was inevitable that she ask who was this Muhammad whose book he had given her and whose prayers he had taught her. She was an apt pupil. She did not fidget, she did not lose patience; arid she did not forget.

He realized with somewhat of a shock that it was well past sunrise, and she was still with him; she had not melted into the air. She seemed a firm and solid creature in the light of day that came in the cavemouth, a white-skinned slender woman in a cloak of wine-red hair. But her eyes were alien, and her face did not take expression as a human woman’s might. It was as immobile as an animal’s, yet as transparent as glass. He could see clear through it to . . . what?

Not emptiness, for all that she might say. There was a soul in her, wrought of fire as the souls of her kind were. It was clean. No weight of memory, no burden of mortality. She might have come into existence on that day when he lay dying in Persepolis. He had dreamed her, maybe, and dreamed her still, face to face over a lamp that, at last, guttered and went out.

She vanished with it, as swift as the flame, and more complete.

oOo

That day he did not go down to Persepolis. He bathed in the innermost cave, in darkness perforce for there was no lamp nor candle; he washed his garments and his turban and spread them in the sun to dry. He swept the outer cave and made it tidy. He prayed when it was time. He kept firm rein on apprehension. If the ifritah did not return with the night, she might not come back at all. He would go back to the ruined city; and after that, to the world from which he had come. His people were waiting. His Mission was ready to begin. And he knew where he would begin it: where she had seen, walking the paths of his thought. There was a castle in the mountains of Persia, far and far indeed from here, though hardly as far as Baghdad or Cairo. The people who had built it called it the Eagles’ Nest: in their tongue, Alamut. With Allah at his right hand and the faithful at his back, he would take it. Then he would win the world for the Faith.

Dressed in clean clothes against his clean skin, he watched the darkness fall. No ifritah took shape in it. No lamp lit itself in the cave. No bread came, no fruit of paradise. He slaked his thirst with water as always, and rebuked his stomach for protesting that he had not fed it, and settled again to prayer. In the morning he would gather his belongings and go. Tonight he would pray, fasting, and strengthen his will for what he must do.

The ifritah would only have been a distraction. He told himself that, and sternly. But he found himself tensing at the whisper of wind in the tree’s branches, starting at the shifting of shadows as the moon rose.

What brought him out, he did not know. Restlessness, maybe. He did not love this place. He owed its owner nothing, if owner the ifritah was. She had preserved his life, but he had taught her the Truth. They were fairly acquitted of debt.

The moon was waning, but his eyes were sharpened to its light. He climbed easily to the. top of the crag and then down upon the narrow way. The moon marked it with silver. He was not a man for fancies, but he found himself imagining that he walked not on earth and stone but on light. It was solid beneath him, both warm and cool, and smooth as a road of the old Romans; but they would have been startled to walk such a way as this.

Persepolis waited for him. He came down the last steep slope, on a road that no longer even pretended to touch mere earth, and walked between the pillars, and stood on the floor of stone. The ghosts seemed to have fled at his coming, but as he paused, they crept back into the light. None touched him or threatened him. The moon was his shield and his guard. Allah was his protection.

He saw the fire as it came, the golden king, the men in strange armor with their empty eyes, whirling in a drunken dance. There were women too; he had not seen those before. Shameless, gauze-robed, rouge-cheeked women, their eyes as empty as their men’s, as all the ghosts’ but that one who was their lord.

“Sikandar,” said the air.

Hasan stiffened but did not, would not turn.

“That is Sikandar,” the ifritah said behind him. “Alexander, that he was then. Every night he comes. Every night he dances.”

“Is he an ifrit atso?” Hasan asked her.

“No,” she said. “Oh, no. He was a man once; a king. Now he is dead. But he is one of the strong ones, the mortals whose spirit is fire. It was too strong for his flesh; it consumed him.”

Hasan stood still. A great thing had come to him, not precisely with the force of revelation, but close to it, and part of it. “I have heard,” he said at length, "that if a man have power, if he be bold beyond the measure of his kind . . . he might master such as this. Yes, even a mortal man, with mortal will, can rule the mighty dead.”

“They have a word for that, these dead,” the ifritah  said. “They call.it hubris. The arrogance that mocks the gods. It fails, mortal man. It destroys the one who suffers it.”

“But if a man is strong, if he acts in Allah’s name—might he not prevail? Even against the dead?”

“The dead have no power,” said the ifritah, “except to take a fool into their realm. As they will take you, man, if you approach them. See, they hunger. They drink life; they capture souls.”

He knew. He felt it. His flesh was cold even in the moon’s armor, its warmth stolen by the crowding ghosts. But he said, “If a living soul could capture them, he could wield them against the world.”

“They can be captured,” she said, “but no one can wield them. Even I; and I am powerful, O mortal man. I have looked the dead king in the eyes, and he has fallen back before me.”

“I have not,” said Hasan.

“You have never met me face to face.”

Nor would he, if he had wisdom; but he did not say it. “I know what you can do, spirit. You can fly through air. You can alter your shape and substance as you will. You can feed a man in the wilderness. What terror is in that, that great Alexander, even dead, should bow to you?”

“My spirit is fire,” she said, “and my soul is stronger than his. He was dross as well as spirit. I am spirit wholly.”

“Yet you wear flesh.”

“Immortal flesh.” She was in front of him who had been behind, with no sound of movement, no flicker of it in his straining eye. She spread her white arms wide. “Go back,” she said. “Go away from this place, lest it consume you.”

“Why do you care for that?” he demanded of her. She did not answer. Her face, lacking the taint of humanity, yielded nothing.

oOo

He went back. The road was plain earth now, and hard, both steep and stony. He hardly noticed it; or the hours it took him to traverse it, into the dawn and beyond, under a pitiless sun.

He had it now. The Mission—that was solid in his mind, as real as if it were accomplished, his people gathered, his stronghold won, his life’s work truly, at last, begun. But Allah had given him more.

Why bind the mere and mortal dead to his service? Why, when he had true power and true fire all but laid in his hand?

He was no mage nor sorcerer, but he had studied widely in his youth. He had read enough to know what it was that he needed. There had been elaborate rites, he remembered; preparations that consumed months, years, decades. But the heart of them was simple.

The floor of the outer cavern was of earth over stone. A sharpened stick, gift of the tree by the spring, marked it well enough. He did not remember all of the words that were to be written; but surely holy Koran would suffice, first Surah and last, and verses that spoke of the binding of the Jinn. He sealed them with the name and seal of Suleiman, but he left it unfinished, a gate to be shut when the prey was within.

His heart was beating. The sun hung low, casting a long spear of light across his working. He made no effort to disguise it. She who knew not the name of Allah might well know the name of Suleiman who bound all her kind, but he had cast his wager with fate, that she would walk into his trap.

He baited it well. He set himself in the center of it as the sun sank toward the hour of prayer. He called, “Ifritah! Would you pray with me?”

He did not wait, or tremble, or betray his eagerness. He began the prayer as if he had no care but that. When he rose from the first prostration, he had a shadow, wine-dark hair, moon-white body, praying as he prayed. Being spirit and not mortal, she prayed with all that she was. She shone like a lamp in the gloom.

“I could wish,” he murmured between prayer and prayer, “that there were light.”

And there was light: great banks and torrents of it. He did not even need calculation: he had bolted from the circle, blinded, astonished, and stood outside of it, before it came to him what she had done. She had filled the cave with light. Lamps, lamps everywhere, lamps hung on chains from the ceiling, lamps banked on stands, lamps scattered across the floor like stars in the naked heaven. Only the circle was empty of them.

With the last of his self-possession, he drew the line that shut the door, and wrote the words that sealed it, the name and titles of Suleiman ibn Daoud, king in Jerusalem, master of the spirits of earth and air.

She rose slowly. She did not look frightened, nor—and this he had feared more—was she angry. She turned in her prison. It was wider than both arms’ stretch, broader than the length of her body if she lay down. She approached the edge that had been the gate. He held his breath. Just as she reached it, she shied. Her eyes went wide; for the first time her face held an expression. Astonishment.

“It burns,” she said.

He did not allow triumph to swell in him. This was the gift of Allah. Allah’s was the glory of it.

“Would you serve God?” he asked the ifritah.

She had retreated to the center of the circle. She crouched there, arms wrapped about knees and chin upon them, green eyes fixed on him.

When she did not answer, he said, “Your spirit is stronger than mine. But Suleiman was stronger than you.”

“Suleiman is dead.” She rocked on the pivot of her haunches. “You are afraid of me. You think that I could burst these bonds, turn all to fire, and sear you to ash for the crime of taking me captive.”

So he had been thinking, but deep, where consciousness was a dim and distant thing. “Would you do it?”

“So full of fear,” she said, “and yet so fearless. So much you trust your Allah.”

“Not mine alone,” he said. “Yours, too, and every earthly creature’s.”

“But he protects you. He let you trap me.”

“So that you might serve him.”

She shivered. It was not with cold: she never felt it. “I am nothing.”

“You are Allah’s.”

“Can nothing belong to Allah?”

“Everything,” he said, “and nothing.”

Her lips curved. It was less like a smile than the arc of a sickle. “Will I serve Allah if I am bound here?”

“You will not be bound here,” he said, “if you will be bound in another fashion.”

“If I will be bound to you.” She rocked back and forth, smiling her terrible, ifritah smile. “You could have asked me.”

That was so human, and so female, that he laughed before he thought.

That sound like bells in the Christians’ churches, clear and cold, was laughter that echoed his. When it died, he said, “Would you have consented?”

“You have not asked.”

Woman to the bone, whatever else she was. “Will you serve Allah in my service?”

“Will you keep me near you always?”

“Do you wish that?”

“Yes,” she said.

He let his breath out slowly. This, he was beginning to think, was not the simple art that he had taken it for. A sorcerer drew the circle; he bound the spirit in it; he bent the spirit to his will. That the spirit might have will of its own, and that not to escape but to bind itself and the man who would have bound it—there was nothing like this in any philosophy that he knew.

Nor was there anything like her. “What is your name?” he asked her.

She blinked once. “I am I. What need have I of a name?”

“Every creature has a name,” he said.

Her brows drew together. “I am—I—” She stopped. “I have no name.”

“You must.”

“I have no name!”

Her anguish rocked him. He steeled himself against it. He bent, poised his hand over the gate. “If I freed you to discover your name—would you go?”

“No,” she said.

There was a silence. The lamps burned in their constellations.

He measured the words carefully, lest they escape too soon. “You do not wish to be free?”

“No.”

“You will stay here until the sky falls?”

“Until you leave,” she said. “Then I follow you.”

“Why?”

“Insh’allah,” she said.

Allah wills.

“I will serve you,” she said, “in Allah’s name.”

“And in your own.”

“I have no name,” she said.

“Then I give you one,” he said. “In Allah’s name, I name you Morgiana.”

There was a tale, a cavern full of thieves, a clever slave, a dance with daggers; no spirits of air, no magic such as this one had, but magic enough, and blood of those who broke faith. The name shaped itself from that. Or perhaps the name shaped the tale.

“Morgiana,” she said, as if she tried the shape and the taste of it, turning it on her tongue. “Morgiana.” She rose. She looked down at herself; she ran hands down her sides. She turned about. “I am . . . something. I have a name. I am myself, a self. Morgiana.” She laughed. “Morgiana!”

She stopped. He remembered to breathe again. She was not human nor mortal nor even true flesh, but the shape of her was woman entirely. He would not have been a man if he had been immune to it.

“And you,” she said, “Hasan-i Sabbah. You gave me myself. I give you what I am. I serve you. I serve Allah, for that you serve Him.”

“You must,” he said, “serve Allah for Himself.”

“I shall learn,” she said. “I will dance for you, bring light for you, protect your life and take the lives of others in your name—do all your bidding, for my name’s sake.” She bowed low in a sweep of wine-dark hair. “My lord, I am your servant.”

As he, in truth, was hers. She, whose power was so great, whose presence in his following would make him feared wherever men were, had chosen to belong to him. What she did, she did for him; if she did ill, on his head it would fall. And if she did well—then it was Allah’s gift, and Allah’s will, and Hasan’s the merit in the courts of paradise.

It was a terrible thing, to be so bound. Terrible, and wonderful.

He swept his hand across the line of the gate. It parted with a sound like a lutestring breaking. He waited, hand still outstretched.

After a moment that stretched to endlessness, her hand met his. Her clasp was warm and solid and very strong.

He drew her out into the light. “Now,” he said, “we begin.”

Copyright © 1992 by Judith Tarr

First published: Aladdin: Master of the Lamp, ed. Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg