The Sleeper in the Sands (17 page)

So Haroun continued with his men far into the desert, travelling across the sands for a further forty days, until at last one evening he saw a column of black stone. Drawing nearer to it, he observed how there were letters in Arabic carved upon its side, and what appeared to be a demon bound by burnished chains upon its base. This demon was buried in sand up to the chest, and it was withered and dry like an afrit or a ghool. Suddenly, though, with a scream which seemed to chill the very air, the monster cried out the holy name of Allah and a single tear began to trickle down its cheek. But it could say nothing more, for its tongue was shrivelled, and it could only wave its arms despairingly as though to break the chains which bound them, until at last the tear dropped and fell upon its tongue. Then the demon met Haroun’s eye and spoke the single word, ‘water’; and Haroun, feeling pity, poured water down its throat.

‘Tell me,’ he then demanded, rising back to his feet, ‘in the name of He who rules the seen and the unseen, what nature of thing you are.’

‘I will not answer you,’ said the demon, ‘until you have sworn that you will drive your sword through my heart.’

‘That is a strange request indeed.’

‘Swear it!’

‘I will slay no living thing,’ Haroun answered, ‘not without just cause.’

The wretched creature moaned in anguish. ‘I shall give you cause enough.’

And so ghastly was his tone, and so pitiable to hear, that Haroun again felt a sudden rush of pity for the creature. ‘Give me the cause, then,’ he vowed, ‘and I shall do as you request.’

‘I was once a man,’ the demon answered, ‘and a Muslim like yourself, the leader of an army of glittering swords. It was my hope to discover the city of Lilatt-ah, and to proclaim within its temples the One and Only Faith. But there is a curse upon that place far too great to overcome, and it was I who was vanquished and overcome myself. In mockery of the Prophet, I was chained and buried here, and a verse in monstrous letters was carved above my head.’

Haroun stepped back. ‘ “Have you thought upon Lilat”,’ he read out aloud, ‘ “the great one, the other? She is much to be feared. Truly, Lilat is great amongst the gods”.’ As he pronounced this, Haroun shook his head in disbelief. ‘There is no god but Allah!’ he cried. ‘And yet this Lilat, I fear, must be a jinni of monstrous powers indeed!’ He knelt again by the side of the buried demon. ‘Tell me,’ he asked him, ‘what is the secret of her greatness? What is the curse which has brought you to this state?’

‘Why’ the creature answered, ‘a prize which some have called the philosopher’s stone, and for which they have ransacked every corner of the world.’ He laughed bitterly, so that all who heard it were chilled to their bones. ‘For although I was once a mortal like you, yet I have been chained to this column now for three hundred years.’

Haroun gazed at him in astonishment. ‘And are the people of Lilatt-ah all as long-lived as yourself?’

‘Indeed,’ the wretch grimaced, ‘for though their heads be lopped from their necks, and their stomachs slit open and their guts spilled in the dust, yet still they will rise and fight another day’

‘And in what does the secret of this miracle lie?’

At once, the wretched creature began to shudder and moan. ‘In an elixir,’ he answered, ‘very bitter to the taste, which I and all my captured men were forced to drink, so that we would suffer torture through the centuries and never gain release.’

‘And how is this elixir prepared?’

‘That is the darkest of all dark mysteries. For it is guarded by the priests, who are the rulers and founders of Lilatt-ah and who came, it is said, in very ancient times, from the land of Egypt when the pagan Pharaohs reigned.’

‘From Egypt?’ Haroun frowned with puzzlement and gazed about him at the endless waste of sands. ‘But why would sages of such power ever have left that rich and happy land?’

The chained creature grinned horribly. ‘Why do you think, O General? So that they might not be disturbed by the likes of you and me.’ And even as he said this, so he started to writhe in his chains, screaming and foaming like a lunatic. ‘Turn back,’ he shrieked, ‘turn back, turn back! For why else was I left here, if not to serve as a warning and a monstrous wonder?
Turn back, I beg you, turn back from here at once!’

Haroun stood bowed in silence, thinking of his vows to the Caliph al-Aziz. ‘No,’ he said firmly, ‘I cannot turn back.’

At once the chained demon slumped and was still. ‘Then it may be,’ he said at last, ‘when you and all your power have been overthrown, that you will be brought here to hang and suffer in my place.’

But Haroun shook his head and slowly drew out his sword from its sheath. He placed its sharp point upon the creature’s withered chest. ‘You have said it yourself,’ he smiled, ‘that even the cursed of Lilat may be brought to Allah’s grace.
La Ilaha Illallah!
There is no God but Allah!’ And so saying he drove the point of his sword into the wretch’s chest, and the demon shrieked and writhed in his glittering chains as he clutched at the blade with his naked hands.

‘Are you dying?’ Haroun cried. ‘Do you feel your immortality begin to fade and slip away?’

The demon froze for a moment, then plunged the blade deeper and yet deeper still, until a spume of black liquid spurted out on to the sands. ‘Yes,’ he whispered suddenly, ‘yes, I remember . . .’

‘But how?’ Haroun pressed him. ‘How can this be happening, when you said you could not die?’

‘Upon the walls. . . the same thing ... I remember -- the last man I fought with before they captured me ... I pierced his heart, and watched him seem to die.’ He began to cough, and more black liquid spattered on the sands. ‘All these many years . . .’ Suddenly he smiled. ‘These many long centuries ... I have wondered ... I have dared to hope . . . whether I had slain that enemy indeed. And now, it seems ... it seems ... I know’ And even as he said this, so his eyes began to roll and their light to dim, and then the very sockets which framed them to crumble. Soon the man’s body was nothing but a cloud of fine dust, and it was borne away upon the breath of a breeze, and the chains hung empty from the column of rock.

Haroun knelt before them, his head bowed in prayer, and then he lifted the fetters and turned to his men. ‘Truly Allah is great!’ he cried. ‘For what have we been given, if not a portent and a sign that even the damned in the city of Lilatt-ah may be slain? Praise be to Allah! For to Him and to His power there is nothing impossible!’

Nor was the faith of Haroun to prove misplaced. A great horror, it was true, had settled upon the hearts of his followers, and the next evening, when they first saw the distant towers of the city, lit a blazing red by the setting of the sun, it was all Haroun could do to keep his men from flight. Monstrous it spread before them, as though formed from living fire, the tips of each flame a vaunting, jagged tower, while around it stretched a wall of colossal, burnished stone which gleamed, and then was lost, as the sun was swallowed by the west. Of the form of Lilatt-ah, now that nightfall had come, only a looming weight of blackness could be glimpsed against the stars, at one with the barren and featureless plain; and Haroun drew out his sword and commanded his men to stand prepared.

It was well that he had done so, for the first assault soon came. Again there was panic and cries of despair, for the enemy seemed wraiths with eyes of burning silver, and with skin which glimmered palely even in the blackest dead of night. Yet by the grace of Allah the Muslim line stood firm. Gradually, with the approach of dawn, the attacks began to fade until at last, as the sun’s first rays rose golden above the east, the enemy retreated to behind the city walls. Some few of them lay still where they had been felled, none of them dead despite their hideous wounds, and a murmur of terror and despair arose amongst the Muslims that their foes could not be slain. But Haroun walked amongst the injured things, stabbing them through their hearts with the point of his sword, and as he did so they shrieked and melted into dust.

Then, without delay, the march was begun upon the walls. Very briefly, entering within their massive shadow, Haroun paused and gazed up in silent wonder, stupefied by the radiance of the city’s glittering towers, its temples encrusted with gold and fiery jewels, its arches, and pyramids, and alabaster domes. But it was not only awe which had served to freeze Haroun, for along the length of the battlements could be seen the bodies of men impaled upon hideous instruments of torture - yet though the tortures seemed deadly, the men were still alive. And Haroun, gazing upon them, felt a desperate surge of anger at the thought of how long they might have suffered in that way, bound upon the torments of endless centuries; and so he stood frozen no more, but drew his gleaming sword and, galloping forward, he raised the cry of battle.

Like a raging lion he fought, he and his men, to breach the gleaming walls of Lilatt-ah, for the conflict was bloody and the enemy strong, and the result stood doubtful all that fierce morning. Yet as the sun climbed ever higher and blazed brighter in the sky, so the strength of the enemy began to ebb and Haroun knew himself borne upon the tide of victory. By midday the streets had been drowned beneath blood, and the dust of the slain lay thick in the air; but still Haroun pressed into the heart of the city. A temple stood there of stupendous size, with gateways of gold and towers of black marble, carved with the portraits of loathsome-headed demons; and it was to the courtyards of this temple that the injured had sought to crawl. Haroun paused in almost pity, gazing upon their wounded, mutilated forms; but then he turned to look up at the midday sun, and he thought how soon it would start to sink into the west. ‘Kill them all!’ he cried -- for he feared that with the darkness their strength might be restored. ‘Not one must be spared! Not one must survive!’

Yet already he felt sick with the sight and stench of slaughter. Up and down his sword arm stabbed, up and down, as he passed from courtyard to hallway and to yet further hall, deeper and deeper into the darkness of the temple until at last, it appeared, there were no hearts left to stab, and no one left in all that monstrous place alive. But still Haroun could not be certain, for although the hallways before him seemed empty now, he had not yet reached the very heart of the temple; and the further he pressed, so the darker it grew, as the roof grew ever lower and each hallway still more small. The air was heavy now with incense, but also with a foetid, strangely sweet smell, and Haroun could feel it lying thick upon his lungs. He stopped suddenly. Gazing ahead, he could make out wisps of brown smoke curling through the gap left by two bolted doors, and beyond them what seemed to be a flickering orange glow.

Haroun crept forward, then all at once hurled his weight against the doors, which splintered and gave. Gingerly, he made his way through the wreckage and into the room beyond. Along either side of it, stacked up to its ceiling, there lay long rows of bodies. They appeared dry and withered, but since they had been bound very tightly with thin swathes of cloth, it was impossible to make out anything of what lay beneath their wrappings. Haroun approached the nearest corpse. Of its face, only the profile of a nose could be distinguished through the cloth, and indeed it appeared barely a human thing at all. Haroun reached out to touch it, yet when he did so he discovered that the head rolled from the neck on to the floor, for the entire body had been dismembered into many parts. At the same moment, from the smoke-wreathed, furthermost end of the hall, he heard a soft hiss of laughter and then a voice as withered, so it seemed, as the dried head by his feet. ‘Do you presume to touch the mystery of the gods?’

Haroun turned. With one arm, he sought to disperse the brown smoke, and with the other he lifted his glittering sword. Slowly he advanced down the length of the hall. He could make out the silhouette of a man now -- shaven-headed, so it seemed, and dressed in the flowing robes of a priest -- standing behind a brazier which was filled with soft flames. A shallow pan had been laid across it, and it was from this that the brown smoke was billowing upwards. As Haroun approached the brazier, he saw a thick black liquid bubbling within the pan.

‘There are no mysteries,’ said Haroun, ‘which the sight of Allah cannot pierce.’

The priest laughed again, an awful, crackling, desiccated sound. ‘Yet I am older than your god by many thousands of years.’

Haroun stretched his arm across the brazier. ‘A vaunting claim indeed.’ He placed the tip of his sword upon his adversary’s chest. ‘Let us hope, then, that it has served to prepare you for your death.’

Haroun felt the priest tense. He jabbed in the point of his sword a fraction deeper, and as he did so he swept at the veil of smoke again, so that he could see what lay beyond it clearly for the first time. A stare as bright and cold as moonlight met his own, and a face drained utterly of all emotion. Once, Haroun thought, it might have been handsome -- once long ago, before the mutilations, for the priest had no ears and his nose had been slit.

‘Death,’ the priest whispered. He smiled suddenly, and Haroun observed that on his brow there were now beads of sweat. ‘I had almost forgotten it, and what it might be.’ Then he closed his eyes. He cried out suddenly, some strange foreign prayer, as he let his body drop forward and drove the sword deep into his heart. ‘Tyi,’ he whispered; then he screamed the same word, ‘Tyi!’ Still he stumbled forward. He crashed into the brazier, so that coals were scattered in an arc across the hall and the pan with its contents was knocked into the air.

Haroun flinched and stepped back as splashes of the liquid fell across his cloak. They seemed without effect, but he had no time to inspect them, for fire was starting to spread through the hall and by his feet the corpse was already a pool of dust and spreading blood. Higher and higher now the flames began to reach, but still Haroun lingered, for he had seen how the blood was flowing fast away into the flickering shadows of the far end of the hall. He recalled the advice of the people of Iram, which had enabled him never to grow lost in the desert, and to discover the fateful city of Lilatt-ah, and so he stepped beyond the brazier to seek the idol out.