& when þe child was ybore
Wel sori wimen were þerfore,
For lim no hadde it non.
Bot as a rond of flesche yschore
In chaumber it lay hem before
Wiþouten blod & bon.
The muse calls me ‘Digenia.’ It is not my real name; that is suspended while I am traveling through these verses, now some 690 years old. To pass through this realm of allegory and myth, of device and symbiotics, one needs to carry a standard. Mine is of the ‘two-blooded.’ Twice-blooded, I want to say. Down through the ages, this language which I speak and write in has no words that contain me. There are plenty of hyphenated adjectives: Half-breed, mixed-blood. But, like the Great Mystery, symbols slide off me. Looking too close is dangerous. I might look back.
And this is why I am here; in a way, I am on a quest. Led through this dream by the Muse himself, my nameless muse—not one of the nine. I am, like any hero of legend, in search of a monster. To see it for myself, to know it, to save it.
O Muse, show me the child of the Christian princess and the sultan of Damascus. Show me them: miracle and monster, Christian and Muslim. Take me directly there, give me no extra words—these clumsy tools that scrape at the hardest of stone. Give me another language that pierces to the bone. Give me a needle and I will embroider my tale.
The muse appears to me in black: long high leather boots with silver buckles, black shirt, black coat hanging down to his knees and a grey scarf around his neck. In one hand he holds a torch, and his other hand shows the way. We pass through metaphor and take a turn at imagery until my eyes adjust. Out goes the torch, and we stand there, listening to the muted sobs that play on the edges of our hearing.
Wordlessly, the muse descends, and we wade into the realm of description. This is where, I know, I will find them. The temple we enter is broad and airy, surrounded by niches filled with statues painted so cunningly they look almost alive in the half-light. Only their idealistic features and artful drapery give the game away. Here are Zeus and Hades, Ishtar, and a figure of a merchant with no face, his head aflame with holy fire.
The stones are old. But there has been a lot of love poured out here, and the scent of holiness is thick around the place like the ghost of incense. Out of a corner steps the man, the sultan of Damascus. His regal attire is subdued and dim, but his bronze face almost glows in the light of the lamps. “Are you here to teach me a lesson too?” he says. “You can see, I have yet to hack my gods to pieces in my rage at their betrayal—their lack of power over my own flesh and blood. Do not think that I won’t do it again. It is my fate to be the faithful one who turns apostate and slays my gods, over and over as the poet willed. Even your philosophers call me ambiguous.”
I use the standard I have brought with me, and by the name of Digenia I address him. “Ambiguous is a worthy name. If I wished to list the horrors unleashed by the Specific and the Formal, I would run out of breath.” He looks hard at me, his eyes large with surprise. “Even in my time, and outside of the narrative, so much pain and suffering come down on those who do not fit the concepts others have coined, who are not aptly described in language. As if it were language itself and not the person who is alive and matters.”
“Am I not a misbeliever?” says the sultan of Damascus. “Isn’t that the whole point of my existence? I prove myself misguided and untrue to the nature of reality to such an extent that my own child lies inert, formless, and lifeless from birth. Am I not a Saracen?” asks the sultan.
“That word . . . ” I pause. Another negative theology. Without, without, without . . . Always a lack, a less-than, always the Other incomplete. Half. “—Is a seal, forged by another, and was never meant for you to apply, neither to yourself nor to me. It is a language you do not know, should not know: the language of blood quantum, of racial categorization, and hierarchy.”
I can see that he does not understand me. What do these terms mean to him, a figure in a medieval romance? He was created before the concept of race, but he should understand the -less, and the sans-.
“I am Heathen,” he says.
“And, if so, what of it?” I say.
His eyes track the niches, scan across his gods and saints. They are beautiful, as they move—almost move—in the dim light of the lamps. Whatever artists created this place, they were masters of effect. I am moved.
The Muse steps into the light. He gestures to me, still silent. It is time to press on. We walk up a turning staircase. The stone shifts under my feet, my steps seeming to summon the blocks out of the air. I am not surprised; this is not my world. Here, I am the interloper, the Being from Beyond.
The sobbing grows more distinct as we ascend. “Is that the mother, or the child?” I wonder aloud. I prepare myself for the worst, and hang the words of another poet around myself, a lorica:
My heart has become able to take on all forms.
It is a pasture for gazelles,
For monks an abbey.
It is a temple for idols
And for whoever circumambulates it, the Kaaba.
It is the tablets of the Torah
And also the leaves of the Koran.
I believe in the religion of Love
Whatever direction its caravans may take,
For love is my religion and my faith.
These are the words of Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi, who walked the earth some 160 years before the story of the King of Tars was written in England. And it is with his words that I enter the chamber of the child of the King of Tars . . .
The sultana dries her eyes as I approach, still cradling in her arms a perfect sphere of white flesh. It looks, at first, like a huge pearl shot through with blue veins and still, for there is no heart within it to pump blood. This is the monster I seek, and the miracle. My words fail me as I step into the room and cross to the mother and her child. The child, formless, lifeless, is perfect. I wonder at the love radiating from the child, manifested into this world from a place where language does not exist.
“My child!” the mother groans. “I never wanted this marriage, never wanted to be unequally yoked . . . ” I recognise the reference. Saint Paul in his letter to the people of Corinth.
Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers:
for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness?
and what communion hath light with darkness?
And what concord hath Christ with Belial?
or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel?
I know, then, that I have wasted my time here. This is, after all, an Englishman’s poem. These phrases, like the red cross that wards the armor of the Red Crosse Knight in The Faerie Queene, are imbued with power that comes from much blood. So much slaughter. What can I say to her? How can I persuade her that this being that is her child has come un-changed from the Great Mystery beyond the fabric of time and space? Where is the mystic in this heart that is wrung to shed hot tears over her monstrous child?
She says, “There is nothing of me in my child. It is formless, worthless, hopeless . . . ” She cries for herself, I see.
I turn to the Muse. “Unravel,” he says.
I am Palestinian. I know the horror that our syncretic and chaotic loves of mixing and miscegenation had on visitors and colonists. And so, it is my place to pick at the threads that the English poet has woven, to leave here with a hole of messy, frogged fabric. Through that hole will be born something Other. I bend to my work, and pluck out the weave quickly. I leave a hole that is perfect and round. Will that mother and father follow their child out of this textual hell? Would they learn to extend love to the flesh, to reach out toward the world as it is: ambiguous, and gloriously chaotic?
I turn back to look at them, the father joining his wife and child. They, too, will have to find a way on that path between the shafts of light and shadow that make up this cosmos. I have done what I can to let in some air, to leave a hole in the veil through which it is possible to glimpse the mysterious and real.
The Muse lights his torch again. Together we leave behind The King of Tars.
Sonia Sulaiman writes speculative fiction inspired by Palestinian folklore. Her work has appeared in Arablit Quarterly, Beladi, FIYAH, Lackington’s Magazine, Seize the Press, and other venues. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best New Weird Award, Lammy, and Palestine Book Awards. She is a Hugo-nominated first reader (formerly of Augur, Strange Horizons, and Uncanny). In her spare time, she is a co-editor of Anathema Magazine. Follow her at her website, soniasulaiman.com, and many fine social media platforms as Sonia Sulaiman.