THE NECRONOMICON ~ The Cthulhu Revelations (4 page)

(Note:  Al-Azrad speaks here of the 111th year of the Muslim calendar, dating to the Prophet’s Hegira into Medina.  In his own Elizabethan translation, John Dee has printed here his
“anno Domini DCCXXX?,”
which corresponds in Latin to the year 730 A.D. ~K.)

~

And so the mortal’s slaughter is the circle.  Azrael—Singer of the Black Angels of All Ending—cruelly hath given birth to all the living.  My own youth frailed so long ago, from a dawning of such innocence, that beneath this moon it seems that I foretell the tale of another man who is yet to come:  one bolder than myself, more in love, and more believing.

For as the child is elder to the ancient one, so too is Truth the destroyer of our hope.

In aging, I am Al-Azrad the Terrible and the Mad, so named the feared and fearing, the doomed and the forsaken.  Yet still I whisper her name in each of the mansions of the night, my beloved, my Adaya.

And forever I shall believe that all of my adorations, in never-end, are the only chains who keep my will in iron bound.  Despite the revelations of Klocha, regardless of the ice-encrusted secret of Nephren-Ka, mortal I remain, ever human in light of all the blasphemies I now know.

For the love of my dead Adaya, I endure.

SCROLL III

Of the Locust,

And a Child in Exile

In the beginning, I was nothing.

I know not my age.  My father, a warrior who wielded a sword of flame beneath the Crescent, died glorious in the service of the Caliph Muawiyah.  My mother, a slave and spoil of war, was nameless, never giving father her one secret, known to the betrothed—and to her child—only as the Shepherdess.

Of her, I remember only kohl-black eyes, lit with love and tears, a chant beloved of the moon and the youngest star, and the scent of amber swirled upon long fingers.

To her I was born in the Rub’ al Khali, the desert wastes of the emptiness, and to that desolation, in my heart I hold.

So are my years unknown to me, yet still I believe I was born on the cusp of the wind of
sharqi
(Dee:  the easterly)
, between anno Hijra forty-two at the eldest, the Year of the Bowing Serpent ... or anno Hijra forty-six at the youngest, the Year of the Twisted Waters.

(Clarice Whateley annotation:  666 A.D.?)

(Note:  Anno Hijra, or anno Hegirae, is another Latin reference pertaining to the Islamic lunar calendar.  The years 42 to 46 equate to, approximately, 663 to 667 A.D.  Here in the annotated manuscript of Scroll III, Ms. Whateley speculates that the year of Al-Azrad’s birth was 666, perhaps referring to the Number of the Beast, which is detailed in the
Book of Revelation
.  There is, as far as this researcher can determine, no certainty to such speculation. ~K.)

The Shepherdess it was who gave her own life standing over me, her blood before my own, until she was taken from me utterly.  That black tale I shall never tell.

~

In all but my eldest memories, I stand fatherless, motherless, a dust-rat in the gold-spun streets of old Sana’a, raised only by the crone Ghanara, most ancient of the
badawi
(Dee:  Bedouin)
in their exile.

For it is said in the deepest desert, to curse a
badawi
woman with that one Fate before which Death himself grows pale, that a dune-
malik (Dee annotation:  Malik, a chieftain, a petty king)
, a chieftain of the sands, need only exile the Daughter of the Desert to the City of Man.  Such, in my youth, remained the crone Ghanara.

(It appears that Al-Azrad is implying that his father exiled his mother the Shepherdess to Jerusalem, and that she either settled in Sana’a and perished there, leaving her son an orphan; or, she sold her son into slavery and he was taken to Sana’a by his new mistress.  Al-Azrad’s implication that his mother died defending him from someone makes it likely that he was orphaned, but the treatise of Ibn Khallikan implies enslavement.  Whatever the truth, the old woman named Ghanara seems to have raised and exploited him. ~K.)

I know only that Ghanara who took me in was not of my kith and kindred.  She had shamed her brood, a murderess in all but name, and so did tremble the hand that cared for me.  For me alone, she cast the tongue, the strap, the eye of the brilliant serpent.  Ghanara was the first one to believe my dreams required stricture, my nightmares focus, and so did raise her trembling hand to me.

Ghanara it is who taught me how to dream.

Thus did I endure, until I grew taller than the slump of her brittle shoulders, and a fear of me overtook her.  Guile-rich Ghanara used me well for thieving, for the reaping of secrets, and so by the time I believed myself to be seven summers eld
(Clarice:  672-3 A.D.?)
, I used her in my turn.

Through a blossoming fire of defiance, through my conviction that I would be worthy in doing Ghanara harm, the youngest sharing of my cruelty, my earliest vision came to me.  The vision may well mean nothing to anyone.  But in my life, it was the first dawning of my own will, and so the birthing of my freedom despite my slavery.

~

The vision, as I beheld it:

~

There came a night, moonless, wherein I beheld a locust, perched upon the driftwood pole which held on high the tent-stall of Ghanara, a skeleton of silk and rag teetering in the wind beneath the south wall of Sana’a.  A vigil I held as the locust shared its secrets, and by first light of dawn a water-gift was revealed to me.  I beheld the locust scraping the dew from its thorny legs, drinking; I watched it crawling deeper into the shadow, to feast upon a dried vanilla husk, crumbling in a basket of twisted reed.

I heard it sing to the night alone, uncared for, adored only by myself and the fading stars, and so I heard in an ocean-voice which rose inside of me, the oneness of myself:

‘The locust, it is my heart.’

The first of all my visions,
ai
.

And so did I come to understand:  the voices of the insects and the
jinn
, the uncared-for and the unseen, would become the one Voice that would sing to the heart within me.

And so in that night, beholding the revelation of the locust, I became myself.

My destiny would be to hear the Voices of the desert,
Al Azif
.

~

And so it was I learned upon that night of the locust Voice:  between the weighing of black hearts, of Ghanara and of mine, mine was the one beating ever stronger.  She was eld and I was young; I would live and she would die.

But her death would not come from my own hand, for I thought it crueler that she should understand this, my rising and her falling; understand and so be powerless to deny my rising glory.

In living, I wanted her to fear me.

That dawn I stole her silver, for it was mine, made by my sweet voice and cunning dances.  I salved my strap-wounds with Ghanara’s finest honeys, and drifted into the streets alone, as my own for the very first.

The locust sang within me.

Too, I stole Ghanara’s obsidian-edged
jambiya
:  not for what it would mean to me, but for what its absence would mean to her.

That night, I did name myself Abd Al-Azrad.

Only once in all the years thereafter, the eyes of Al-Azrad, the self-named, and the eyes of Ghanara did meet again.  She beheld me in hatred and in fear, and so faded away behind me.  The threat of her lost
jambiya
at my belt stayed within her eyes as she fled away.  From that twilight on, I served a proven wisdom:  my only master was the locust, not the crone.

SCROLL IV

Three, the Children of the Dreaming

For two handfuls of ageless seasons
(Clarice:  674-5 A.D.?)
, I sang and I did dwell in every sand-etched alley of Sana’a, shadowing and avoiding the Caliph’s bladesmen, stealing figs, partaking of the rare gifts of praise or the dancers’ palmsful of offered waters.  By the lords of the northern caravans, and those who deigned to feed me, I although a starveling was yet admired for my grace and for my visions, for my songs and the poetry from out of my shadowed mind.

Young and alone, I was weak among the hierarchies of the storytellers.  Never could I craft the desired tales, the haunted journeys, nor sing the desert songs with truest bliss or the certainty of experience; yet I could remember all I heard, and feign the conviction of any tale’s sincerest speaker.  In mimicking the songbirds of the sands, I could sing any tale with sincerity.  I could become in voice a scarred and lusty mercenary of the caravans, or the sly and jovial changer of the silver, or the whispering, hesitant daughter of the water seeker, who proved to be the wisest of them all.

For songs are never sung as a glory of their own creation; songs are sung to be an echo of life’s unveilings.  There is no song of songs, no sole triumphant Oneness to the art, for lives are many and every sufferer has a tale which can be cast upon threads of beauty by the voice and the voice alone.

In learning the secrets of song, I too learned that mortals
burn
, forever divided by their desires, a breed in twain:  men speak of the horrors of death and the blade’s bloodletting, the rapture of the kill; but only women see truly the horrors beneath life’s being, the moments of profundity, the blood-shadows which swim beneath the Fates inside the hearts of all.  Men see; women understand.

The tales of men when sung did bring me meager silver, yet this secret of the women was ever in my own heart’s burning.  As I grew older, I sang the women’s truth alone.  My songs were not only heard, they were felt.  I was one string, and my listeners did resonate with me, finding themselves to be in tiding with the lyric of my pain.  Together, I and my audience were an instrument.  And so, more than any of the other singers who did envy me, the palmings of smile and silver came to me alone.

~

By the time I believed my summers to be nine
(Whateley has scribbled here:  675 A.D.?)
, I was tall, my dagger whetted, and my voice was sweeter still.  The urchins who I ran with, daughters and sons of whores, were jackals of lovely face and fickle claw.  These orphans were stronger stars than I, yet less radiant, and so the more courageous in their fall.  These nameless ones protected me, shielded me from bladesmen and from thieves.  Where I did wisely fear adults, the “giant ones” and their ways, the other street children stood forth defiant in my name.  I should have died, but my songs brought forth a sympathy of hearts.

The children were bitter and full of fire, living only for a day, sucking the vibrancy of each moment in desperation and casting the husks aside.  From day to day and night to night, these children would forget themselves.  Yet I, Al-Azrad, I was their rememberer.  I was the beholder of merchants’ eyes which reflected the secrets of the thief; I was the speculator of hearts, ere lovers would spurn and wound one another and return to the arms of another; I was the navigator of dung-pits and empty cisterns.

I braved little, I remembered everything.  I won all.  In becoming one with shadow, in dwelling in every alley, many of the whispers told throughout the city’s heart echoed in their course inside of me.

So did I become the youngest of the loremasters of Sana’a.  For when one whispers of lust or murder or betrayal, who would suspect that of all who are near, it is the child who is listening, who is remembering?

I echoed with every secret, unsuspected.  I told much, I ended others’ trust in the unworthy with revelations.  Those “giant ones” I informed were ever grateful for my words.  I gained trust, I spoke of others’ treachery.  Lies revealed carry a dear price.  More silver and even gold found me at every turn.

The other street children revered me.  I was the jackals’ shadow, the night-pack’s will.  My voice was the more beguiling, I was taller, if not stronger; and quicker.  My arms were longer.  When figs or scraps of
kubaneh
-bread were thrown, the jackals snapped beneath me, but the lion’s share was mine.  So did the singing one, I the locust-born, grow ever greater in their eyes.

~

Of those countless orphans, two became my family, unified by the secret of our dreaming.  We shared one thing only in common, the nightmare of R’lyeh.  Of this I will tell you (*).

The first of my soul-kindred was named Akram, then my dearest friend ... Akram, the boy-giant, a deafened brute with a clefted brow and ever-smile.  Between us stood the girl, with fingers as long as those of the Shepherdess, and laughter of sweet waters:  Adaya, of Judaea
(Clarice:  the Jew?)
, the sin-daughter, my beloved.

We three—circling through the nights, sheltering together around our shared revelation of the nightmare—became as one in heart and yielding.  So did these two become not only my friends, but my family.  For those few years, until the night of the eclipse, I did not feel as if I were alone.

~

(*) Have I not spoken of the One, of Great Cthulhu?  We three did dream, we three did dream in unity.

From birth’s breath on, as elder as I remember, the nightmare of my father was ever with me.  The nightmare, from the first, is this and this alone:

I dream of a city crushed by the ocean, Cyclopean, Ghul-sculpted, labyrinthine, of obelisks who soar up through the waters’ darkness, tear-stained with ichor and with resins bled of emerald.  The etchings of unearthly sigils stand clawed upon every wall, every pillar.

From this sunken city rises a blackest majesty, the one unhallowed spire which surmounts all else in terror, a graven needle which would make even a mountain’s shadow shrivel from its reach.  This spire, it sings in the deepest voice without a tongue, a purest shiver of lightning’s silence, speaking thusly:

‘Cthulhu ftaghn.’

~

As a child of the Khali, before Sana’a, every night I dreamt of the sunken city.  My father forsook me, for I was the echo of his own dreaming; my mother the Shepherdess could not hold away her tears.  In years after, cruel Ghanara would, in my waking nightmares, seduce me with all her hatred into silence.  It was only in speaking to other children, the blackest jackals of Sana’a, that I found two other dreamers, two only who would confess: