It has reached me, my dear goray sahibs, that Taimur the Trickster and M____ the magician stood finally on the Red Road amidst sky-high roseate mountains and faced each other, and upon M____’s face was disbelief followed by rage so dreadful Taimur felt his micturition sting no more and a stream ran down the inside of his shalwar, darkening further the red dust and gravel beneath his feet.
“You,” said the sorcerer in a voice so flat it increased the terror in Taimur’s heart tenfold, “will pay for this. Your punishment will last not for a moment or two, but a hundred years.”
Worse than this? Taimur’s body was on fire. The protective magic of the sorcerer’s ring had scalded him in several places; large bullous blisters wept all over him.
Did their intrusion break the moonbeam enchantment? The girl Mehrunnisa was nowhere to be seen.
Above them the universe was starless, a darkling goblet.
“Why do it? What gain have you from this?” said the sorcerer, a note of bafflement in his voice.
“None,” answered Taimur, “but that if I were to come to harm, why should you escape it?”
The fury returned to M____’s face. He lifted a hand, but before he could as much as flick a finger, the earth jerked them both. One moment they were upright on a still, unending stretch of road; the next the ground had folded on itself, its two ends meeting—or so it seemed to Taimur, for he had the sensation of the world rounding, a perfectly dizzying feeling that knocked all breath out of him—and they were standing in a vast tenebrous market square.
“God above,” breathed Taimur. “It is true.”
It was.
This was a world baptized in blood, its air and sky inflamed unto disquiet. Lamps drooped from wooden posts to redden its eerie corners. Desolate stalls, barren horse carts, neatly piled bundles of rich rugs, trays of apples, pomegranates, and mangoes—wherever they looked lines of merchandise and edibles stretched. Yet not a soul to partake of any of it.
In the center of the square was an elevated platform, a ten-foot-high floating circular structure of marble atop a thick old-wood pole of carved human faces. These visages were wide-eyed, lips stretched back to reveal discolored teeth and thick, lolling painted tongues. And each tongue moved: slow, molten wood licking the face above and below it. Before the pole stood an army of man-sized puppets, their ruby eyes fixed on the interlopers.
A woman with a crown of feather and gemstone stood on the marble dais above them. Her presence filled the world.
“Mercy of mercies, you are here, dear husband,” she said, her words loud and commanding, as if they were the only reality in this world, “may my soul be sacrificed for you.”
“Fatima,” said M____ and on his face was awe absolute. Words seemed to fail him. He gazed at her, this tall, beautiful being with her perfect face seemingly chiseled of agate and fire opal. Time would not dare touch it. Her hair, black as the beginning of time, streamed around it.
“Welcome to my world, my earthly god,” said the Queen of Red Midnight, her face a glittering, million-faceted gemstone. “See how I’ve prepared it for you. The sweetmeats, the clothes, fineries, enchantments. All for you, life of my heart. Oh, how I’ve waited for you. Come see what my longing and heart-blood have made of me and mine.”
M____ stepped forward. A buzzing permeated the air as the sea of puppets parted and a shimmering staircase appeared, coiling down the pole, wrapping itself around the grimacing faces.
“Centuries I waited,” said the woman, “thousands of miles I traveled to find you. Pray tell, did you not miss me, my lord, your vexing, emotion-ridden wife? Did you not think of our love and our youth?”
“Yes,” said the sorcerer as if transfixed, but his left hand twitched as he ascended the staircase. The latter spiraled up gently, like a serpent, each face on the pole turning to watch the sorcerer go by. “Yes, my dear. I have missed you. I’m so sorry for all the distance and trouble we have caused each other. That I caused you. I thought you would hate me for it.”
“Trouble, yes, so much trouble,” said the mistress of red. “But hate you? It took me a while to understand my missteps. An epoch, and many houses. Tell me, my husband, do you still have my heirloom, my father’s ornamented manuscript?”
“I do,” said the sorcerer. “But I don’t have it here, my dear. It sits waiting for you in my chambers beyond your redlands.”
“Your chambers, my lord?”
Fatima lifted her gaze and looked at the heavens of her making. M____ reached the dais and stepped off. Outlined against a bleeding sky, twin titans, they faced each other, as the forgotten Taimur watched from below.
“Indeed. But all I have to do is snap a finger and my creature will bring it in the turn of an eye.” His eyes were fixed on Fatima, clever and eager. “I know, Fatima, that I made many mistakes. I should have never left. I should have taken your reproach, fair as it was, and my punishment for those years of neglecting you. But it’s not too late, my wife. Say the word and we shall be together again, our powers conjoined, two halves coming together to create a tremendous whole the like of which the world has never seen.”
Fatima smiled. “Would that we could, my dear husband. Indeed that would be most desirable.” She leaned forward to rest her head on his broad chest. “Except for one minor difficulty.”
“What is it?”
Taimur watched her lift her head and gaze into M____’s eyes. “I detest that book.”
The eagerness in M____’s face disappeared. A frown replaced it. “My lady?”
“There is, however, another book I’m very interested in.” Fatima reached out and touched the ring of Solomon. The sorcerer recoiled, but the spiral staircase behind him lashed and twisted itself around his torso. M____ jerked and tried to move his hand, but it was useless. The Queen of Red Midnight held him firm, nary a care on her blazing face.
“A monkey appreciates not the taste of ginger,” she said. “What wonderful adages exist in this land.” Tenderly she removed the ring from his finger. A spark, a curl of sanguine smoke, and the ring sat glittering on her palm.
“No!” The sorcerer’s voice was filled with such horror that Taimur fell back.
“No? But this is my world, my love. Shaped in my image, painted with my blood.” She slipped the ring on, moved back from M____, and twice blinked.
The kingdom of Red Midnight crumbled.
Taimur experienced it like the dissolution of smoke above a coal hearth or the surfacing of one’s face from water.
They stood in an enormous cavern before a flickering fire. The ceiling was higher than Lahore Fort, the walls uneven, strangely undulating. Ten paces away in the finger-play shadow of the flames, M____ hung spread-eagled, as if pegged to the air, his patched Punjabi khussas dangling a foot above the ground. Fatima stood before him, face solemn, looking up into his eyes.
“I’ve reddened many a midnight dream,” she said, “and cast the net of my talism wide in the eight directions of the wind. I’ve called many moon-struck roses to me: to unshackle them, sometimes to make love to them, and found their husbands or fathers or brothers trailing in their wake, pet mongrels reluctant to let a prize bird go.”
She glanced beyond the fire and Taimur saw that the walls of this cavern were not granite or rock. They were constructed of the bodies of thousands of Fatima’s puppets, except that their flesh was meat and not wood. Their eyes were stitched closed with what he first thought was worms. Another look showed they were coils of intestines sewn through the lids. The meat puppets writhed, thousands upon thousands, palm sutured to face, foot to lip, torso to torso—a tenebrescent mosaic of male flesh of every color and race splayed, conjoined, and alarmingly alive.
“But this is my place, my talism,” said Fatima. “Do you know what I had to do to make it mine?”
M____ screamed in response. His eyes bulged as he struggled to lower himself to the ground, but it was impossible. Fatima’s magical construct had disintegrated; her magic had not. The air gripped him tight.
“Three children, she told me—Zulaikha, that ancient lighter of midnight fires. And they had to be mine. So I went back, you see. I went back and fucked those men in their winehouses and alleys and this time their seed came alive in me. I bore their bastard children.
“And a part of me said, O Allah, if You are still there, give me a sign. Destroy them in my womb like you destroyed my other children. But you know—” And here Fatima laughed a laugh that singed the air and flooded the air with crimson. “Such was not His will this time. They lived. All three. All boys.
“So when I had my third, I took them to Zulaikha in her unholy cave and she bade me slice their genitals and throats until blood spurted from them into her bucket of sigils. She feasted upon the meat dolls left behind and satiated her hunger thus. Then she dipped her hooves into the bucket and drew upon my womb, upon which red gushed from between my legs. She admixed my blood and the blood of my blood and I drank it, and in that way I was begotten anew.
“So you see, dear husband, I did sacrifice my soul for you. This is no accidental magic like yours. This is another kind. Here you are not my earthly god, nor I yours. In this domain I am all gods. I am,” Fatima said kindly, “godhood.
“But we were speaking of books, weren’t we? I hated my father.” She frowned. “Tell the truth I don’t remember him much now, but I remember the hate. ‘He is a good man, Fatima,’ he said to me. ‘Marry him, Fatima.’ Abbi and his damned book. Abbi and his sacred recitations. Fourteen, and he married me off, arranged and decorated, like a travel bag. I wanted his book back so I could destroy it. I could not care less about its contents; what mattered was it was his. And I knew eventually you would come to me to bargain if you weakened enough. And indeed here you are.
“But you didn’t bring my book.”
Taimur trembled like a drop of exudate on a fingertip. The air of the cavern thrummed with heat.
Fatima reached up to kiss M____’s hands tenderly, one after the other. Something shifted in her eyes and a thought occurred to Taimur, Not eyes but festering wounds; then she stepped back and closed them.
Red eddied up from the earth, a delicate churn that turned into a whirlwind. It engulfed M____.
“A book for a book,” said Fatima.
M____’s rich robes fell like curtains.
He opened his mouth and gurgled. His tongue dropped out and kept dropping, a fishing line of bloodied meat, bits of bone and cartilage crunching and mashing their way out, until his gullet and stomach had been fetched. His heart warped into a beating walnut, his lungs popped and shrank into ribbons that flailed out of his nostrils. His rib cage collapsed inward to meet his vertebrae, an ossified marriage thrust back into the serrated scaffolding of spine.
Taimur fell to the ground, drew his knees to his chest, and began to moan.
M____ quivered midair; his bones melted. The skin of his torso and limbs softened, peeled, and unfurled into fine parchment, hanging down in sheets; the lining of his intestines snapped free of its contents and draped his redesigned organism. His entrails unraveled, dozens of feet of it, snaking back, threading and climbing his spine like vines. Blood from his ruptured vessels, thousands of intimate channels and red roads, streamed out to join the crimson maelstrom enwombing him and painting him. Came the pièce de résistance: M____’s head slumped forward, thinned and fused with his excavated chest to form a brilliant frontispiece.
Thus emerged the sorcerer, in Fatima’s domain, a newly bound red book with ornamented, glistening leaves.
“My manuscript of M____,” purred the Queen of Red Midnight, opening her eyes and gazing upon her masterpiece.
As her storm began to abate, M____ fluttered, weeping red vapor that ebbed to the ground. A keening sound filled the air briefly. Then the tome of blood that was M____ vanished.
Finally Fatima the Great and Terrible turned her eye upon Taimur.
He flinched and curled himself into a ball.
“Thank you for bringing him here. You can come out now.”
Taimur stared at her.
She smiled and her smile was the appearance of the sun on a cold day. “All ruses, all guises, all veils part in this world, my love. Rise, child. Come to me.”
Taimur’s heart thundered. He tottered to his feet.
“A wonderful mother, wasn’t she?” said Fatima. “After your father died, the greatest of mothers. What did she say to you when she first revealed the truth?”
Taimur’s legs trembled. His tongue was cotton, but Fatima was waiting. One didn’t make a queen wait.
“Seven,” said Taimur. “I was seven and hiding beneath our old cracked table, furious at my mother. Asim and Qasim, the two neighborhood bastard boys, were making fun of me, saying I was a craven, because I refused to take my clothes off and swim with them in the canal. I told them I had weak lungs and Mother said my body must always be kept warm, but they laughed at me and called me a eunuch. So I ran and hid, and she found me sobbing, my mother. She sat me down and we talked and that was when I really understood why she hid who I truly was from the world.”
Fatima’s ageless eyes were gentle. “Say it.”
Taimur’s cheeks were wet. Were they tears or the sorcerer’s blood?
“Out with it,” said Fatima. “Say your name.”
Taimur opened her mouth. “Tehmina. I am Tehmina.” And she lifted a hand, wiped the moisture from her face, and clasped her mother’s amulet to her chest.
Fatima’s face was a rose of pleasure. “Yes, my love. There is no shame any longer. No fear. No need to hide, for you have done me the most exceptional of favors and you will be repaid in kind.”
“I am a woman,” said Tehmina, words now rushing from her mouth, as if a moment’s pause would bind them. “I was born a woman. But my father was dead and I had not brothers, and Mother, when she was fifteen, was married off to a man nearly twenty years older, and we had this shop but no one to run it. The apothecary was at risk. A dawa-khana run by two-women would wither and fail—but if I were a boy…” Tehmina swallowed. “I am so thirsty.”
Fatima rubbed two fingers together and Tehmina held a goblet of cool rosewater sherbet. She lifted it, took a few sips. Fear was leaving her. If the Queen of Red Midnight had wanted her harmed, she would be dead already.
“So she gave me concoctions and a daily medicine to ensure I would not curve. My body would remain flat like a man’s. And her plan worked. I have been a man all these years with no one the wiser. Sometimes”—Tehmina paused to drink— “sometimes I forget it myself: that beyond the dull evenness of my body lies secreted a woman.”
“But there is a bit more to it, my love.” Fatima’s gaze went to the amulet around her neck. “Isn’t there?”
Tehmina glanced down at it. “This? It was my mother’s.”
“What you wear is an ancient scroll of Afrasayab, once a great king of sorcerers. I know not how it came upon your family, but I would venture that it is what perfects the illusion for those around you. It offers you protection. How else could you get M____ here? You should always wear it … as you should this ring.” Fatima took off the ring of Solomon and tossed it to Tehmina, who caught it, surprised. “Put this on, my lovely rose, and make a wish.”
“A wish.” Tehmina looked at the ring, at its tarnished ancient sigil of black onyx and two winged women carved around its band, as one looks at a scorpion’s stinger. “Isn’t that how the hidden folk of Peristan and Mount Qaf trap a human? By granting wishes and binding them in evil covenants? No, my queen, I’m better off without the dual-edged blades of wish and magic.”
Fatima nodded. “You might be. But the half-creature of the ring is not. Without a worthy master to restore it, the homunculus will wither and pass on, its ancient magic vanished from the world. I must not take the ring, for if I do I may become a greater specter than I am already.” In her eyes were shadows that slipped past each other. “Fear not, O Tehmina, for my spell has been lifted: The homunculus will weaken no more. It will serve your pleasure, for I know”—she smiled—“you will be a worthy mistress.
“And now, O Tehmina, I give you this: You will be the witness to my story and your words will be sweet and beguiling. You will repair the story of M____ the cobbler of Cairo so the world knows the story behind the story. Let his name be lost, let his legacy not be his contrived caravan of dreams, for there was naught but greed and ignorance that traveled through that desert with him.
“My sweet Tehmina, come nigh. Step close to me. That is right: Put your forehead on mine. Now, my dear sweet blushing rose, make us a wish.”
And, it has reached me, my wonderful hosts, that eyes wide, palms sweating, Tehmina the Trickster stepped forward, and rested her head against the queen’s.