THE BIBBENS’ PHONE kept ringing on and off all day after they carried Theo home. Twice it was Miss Spivey calling and once she asked for me, but I declined the opportunity to speak to her. It was well past supper, which May and Ildred had prepared, Momma being busy with Mrs. Boykin and Theo, when a long black motorcar turned down our lane and slipped past our house on its way to the Boykins’ place. I was so sure it was Miss Spivey coming back to us, abashed and desperate to make amends, that I went inside the house to watch her from the kitchen window where I myself could not be seen. The car was a Cadillac LaSalle, my brother Ebenezer said, looking over my shoulder out the window. Like Mr. Gordon’s, only black. There are no words to express my surprise when the driver came around and opened the door of that Cadillac LaSalle for a very small woman in a plain brown coat—which she definitely did not need on this June evening—and a brown felt hat. The driver reached into the backseat and pulled out a black satchel and carried it for her to the Boykins’ door.
“Who the heck is that?” asked Ebenezer.
Momma came home and told us, “Dr. Janet Miller’s come to look after Theo.”
If Miss Spivey had sent Shahrazad or Alaeddin, I couldn’t have been more amazed.
Etta George was right there in the room when Dr. Janet Miller examined Theo. She had placed her thin white hand on Theo’s forehead. She had opened his eyes, first one, then the other, with her fingertips, and leaned over him to peer into each. She had taken his hand from under the coverlet, Etta said, and laid it flat on hers, first palm to palm, then turning it over and peering at it like a fortune-teller. She took a watch from her pocket and, putting her fingers on his wrist, she frowned at the hands of the watch for a long minute. When next she folded back the coverlet, baring his chest, Etta almost turned away, but the instrument—part rubber, part shining silver—that Dr. Miller pulled out from under her coat caught Etta’s eye and held it. “It was a stetho-scope,” she said. “She put the two ends in her ears, like this”—Etta showed us, using her index fingers—“and the other end—it was a little silver bell. She put that little bell on his chest, here and here—and there.”
Ralphord asked, “What for?”
“To listen to his insides.” Etta George looked at me and Ralphord and Ildred one by one. She whispered, “She let me listen, too.”
“With the stethoscope?” Ildred asked sharply. She said the word as if she’d always known it. Etta nodded and touched her ears, one hand to each. Ildred asked, “What did you hear?”
Etta thought. “A drum,” she said. “And the wind.”
We sat for a minute, all of us, listening to leaves rustle.
“What else?” Ildred asked. “Did she do anything else to him?”
“She felt of his ribs and his arms and legs. She said he didn’t have anything broken. And then she tucked the quilt around him and asked Miz Boykin what he liked to eat.”
“What’s your son’s favorite dish?” was what Dr. Miller had asked.
Mrs. Boykin only looked at her, trying to extract the sense of what the lady doctor said from the morass of sadness into which they had all so suddenly fallen.
“If he could have anything he wanted, what would he choose? What does he like best?”
“To eat?” Mrs. Faith Boykin looked at her boy, lying so still there in the bed, and her eyes filled up, but she took a deep breath and composed herself. “If I had to say his very, very most favorite thing, that’s got to be pan-fried bream, fresh out the pond.”
“Anything else?”
Etta George, who could still feel the cool metal of the stethoscope in her ears, said, “What about pecan pie, Miz Boykin?”
Mrs. Boykin considered. “Theo does love pecan pie. With whip cream on it, that might be his second-best favorite.”
“Do you have the ingredients?” Dr. Miller asked. “Any pecans on hand?”
“Ma’am, I got nineteen acres’ worth of pecans put by. Almost.”
“Make him a pecan pie,” Dr. Miller said as she put the stethoscope back in her bag and snapped it shut. “Leave this door open so he can smell it. We want to let him know there’s something waiting for him over here. Something worth waking up for.”
Mrs. Boykin’s hands went straight to her heart. She said, “You think he’s fit to wake up—I mean to say, you think it’ll be soon?”
Dr. Miller stood beside the bed with her doctor bag. She looked at Theo. She said, “Well, we don’t know how long he was without oxygen, but his vitals are good. I think we can expect something. May I leave this here, Mrs. Boykin?” She made to set her bag on the dresser. “I believe I’ll take a tour of Baghdad, Georgia.” She turned to Etta. “You’ll come and find me at once if anything changes,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am, I will.”
Etta told us she helped Dr. Miller put on her coat. “She’s got a little rheumatism in her left arm makes it hard to bend her elbow,” Etta said.
Ildred asked, “What do you think she meant when she said we could ‘expect something’? Did she mean, expect him to be all right?”
“Sounds like it,” Etta George said, but we caught something in her tone.
“What else?” Ildred asked.
“Before she left, she told Miz Boykin, if he didn’t wake up when that pie was finished, she ought to start making another one.”
“It don’t take that long to make a pie,” Ralphord pointed out.
“Miz Boykin said she could make a lot of pies before she ran out of pecans, and Dr. Miller said, ‘That’s the spirit.’”
Ildred stood up.
“Where you off to?” Ralphord asked her.
“I’m going fishing. I can catch some bream.”
Dr. Janet Miller’s tour of Baghdad began and ended at the schoolhouse, where she picked up a blue ribbon strung with camel bells and put it in her pocket, jingling it from time to time the rest of the night, both on purpose and by accident. She stood looking at the rear wall of the schoolroom for a long time, tilting her head back to see the pictures that were higher up and bending over to see the very lowest ones. She didn’t look like Miss Spivey at all—more like our old teacher Miss Chandler, if anything, being so short and plain and maybe a little frail, her hair done up in an old-lady way, although I wouldn’t have called her an old lady quite yet—but she talked like Miss Spivey. Not in her pronunciation, in which Dr. Miller sounded more southern than Miss Spivey did, but in the things they said and the way they said them. Now, for instance, looking at the pictures, Dr. Miller asked, “Our friend Theo drew these?”
I was following her around. I didn’t think she noticed. Her question startled me enough so I didn’t answer right away, which caused her to turn around. “Gladys?” she said.
If I was startled by her question, I was stunned by her knowing my name. “Ma’am?” I said, and then, “Yes. Yes, he did, leastwise the ones that are made, not from the book.”
“This is one we can’t afford to lose,” she said.
For a minute, I thought she meant the picture. I said, “Did Miss Spivey tell you my name?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I’ve heard about all the Cailiffs.”
“Force, too?”
She sighed. “Yes.”
My eye fell on the picture of the Prince about to kiss the sleeping Princess. Before I could change my mind, I asked, “Is Force really an Arabian prince?”
“No,” said Dr. Miller. “He’s your brother.”
“I knew that.”
“I’m sure you did.”
To change that subject, I seized the opportunity to ask, “Did you hear—did Miss Spivey ever talk about my sister May? Did y’all meet May?”
“I did. May brought over plates of chicken for supper, she and Mildred.”
“Ildred,” I corrected her without thinking.
“I beg your pardon?”
“There’s no M. Momma dropped the M.”
She said, “And all the while I thought Grace was saying ‘Mildred.’”
I said, as if she might not have noticed, “May’s the one who’s expecting.”
“We listened to the baby’s heartbeat,” Dr. Miller said. “Your sister has a good strong baby on the way.” She jingled the camel bells in her pocket. “She could stand to be a little stronger herself, though. It would help if she gained a few pounds. You have to encourage her.”
“Did you listen with your—what kind of scope?”
She said it for me, and then she spelled it so I could write it on the blackboard right under terik saddle, which was still up there with a picture of one drawn in chalk. “Theo drew that saddle, too,” I said.
“Oh? Is this school—is it the Negro students’ school?”
I said, “No, but sometimes they came in here—for things. Usually just Theo.”
“I see.” Dr. Miller picked up a piece of chalk and drew a fat letter Y that I knew from Etta George’s description was supposed to be a stethoscope. She stepped back and squinted at it.
I asked her, “Is Theo going to be all right?”
She said, “It’s too soon to tell.”
“When can we tell?”
“When he wakes up. Well, here comes someone.”
It was my sister May at the door, still in her Shahrazad costume, but with some of the moons and stars flaking off and the long veil draped over one shoulder like a towel. She said, “There was a lot of folks coming to the Boykins’ to see how Theo was doing, so Momma thought maybe I should bring them on over here, where there’s some room to sit down.”
Not until she stepped inside did we see that she had a large crowd behind her, mostly white people in the front—Mrs. Reverend Stokes, Louise Blount, Ildred, and a tear-stained Ralphord were right behind May—and colored people toward the back of the crowd: fifty-some people marching into the schoolhouse to sit for a spell and wait for news about Theo. There were more people coming all the time, one here, two there, this or that one leaving and coming back with another fresh-baked pie in hand, women carrying in pots of coffee and pitchers of tea and cups and plates and forks for the pies, mostly pecan, of which there were no fewer than a dozen lined up on Miss Spivey’s desk before the night was over. The whole room smelled just heavenly, and although I kept counting heads all evening, I couldn’t keep track. Some people paused in the doorway before they came in, but they did come in. After all the fuss about eleven colored children spending one morning in the schoolhouse, I wondered what the Superintendent of Schools would say about this. My momma said later that everybody’s mind was so crowded with worrying about Theo that there wasn’t any room for them to worry about what color the person worrying about Theo in the row behind them happened to be. Momma said it was too bad everybody couldn’t keep themselves that busy worrying about each other all the time.
When Mrs. Reverend Stokes arrived, she announced on behalf of the local clergy that a prayer service for Theo Boykin was going on right now over at White Springs Baptist Church. “All denominations are welcome,” she said, looking around at the faces, light and dark, that were looking back at her. Most folks were pleased, I think, to hear there was a prayer service going on, but nobody got up and left in order to attend. Some of the ladies got started on handing out slivers of pie to people sitting on every available surface—desks, chairs, shelves, boxes, floor, and so forth. Dr. Miller went off to check on Theo, and when she came back with no change to report, she looked around at all those people and proposed that we keep a vigil in the schoolhouse.
“Should we pray?” somebody asked.
“They’re already praying over to the church,” Mrs. Reverend Stokes said.
Dr. Miller said she thought someone might tell a story.
“Like Shahrazad,” said Mavis Davis from where she sat on the floor, her back to the wall, right under the rolled-up map. She was still in her overalls.
Dr. Miller looked at her. So did I. For that matter, so did everybody.
“Shahrazad held off the Garnerer of graveyards,” Mavis pointed out. Not everybody there knew what she was talking about. I couldn’t help but think again how wrong Miss Spivey was if she thought Mavis Davis didn’t think at all.
Dr. Miller said, “Well, then, who has a story to get us started?”
Almost to a person, we turned to May. She was our Shahrazad, after all. She was sitting at the teacher’s desk, up on the platform at the front of the room, with all the pie plates arrayed before her. She turned pink. “Y’all want me to make up a story?”
“You don’t have to make it up,” said Dr. Miller, looking more like a sparrow than ever perched on top of a desk with her feet not even close to touching the floor. “You can tell a story that someone told you. Or one that you’ve read.”
“Does it have to be true?” asked Mrs. Lulu Blount from the bench against the back wall, where all the Baghdad pictures hung.
“As true as she can make it,” Mrs. Reverend Stokes said.
May searched the ceiling and also our faces—lingering for a moment on mine, I don’t know why—as if she were looking for a way to begin. Now, it’s true enough that Miss Spivey told May more about everything than she ever told anyone else. They came to confide in each other beyond the ordinary, as I believe I have already mentioned. It’s also true that if a story is any good, it won’t take long before you’re picturing it in your head in a lot more detail than you’re actually being told—imagining what folks look like, for example, or what they must be feeling inside. A storyteller like Shahrazad or my sister May can leave a story in your memory as if it happened before your very eyes. All of that might account for some of what we heard in the schoolhouse that night, but it doesn’t change the fact that the story May commenced to tell us was bigger than any story she could have known to tell, and yet—another fact—she told it.
“It hath reached my ears,” is how she began, but then she let that go, and with a faint, sly smile and a glance at Dr. Miller, she said: “I heard tell one time of
A Redheaded Woman Who Hid in a Harem
“The redheaded woman was our own Miss Spivey,” May pointed out at the start.
(At least, she used to be our Miss Spivey, was what I thought right then.)
When Miss Grace Spivey came home from college in May of 1930, May said, she thought she might just go insane.
It was spring, of course, and Nashville was so thick and sweet with wisteria and honeysuckle that the very air could make a body choke. The effects of October 29, 1929, had not yet dimmed the bright round of country club dances and the like that marked the coming of spring to Nashville society, so Grace Spivey had come home to a closet full of new gowns and a tight schedule of fittings noted on her personal calendar in her mother’s graceful hand. She stayed in her room a lot of the time, deliberately missing appointments with her mother’s seamstress and avoiding the friends of her youth.
It seemed to Grace that those young women—Amanda Mae and Sally Ann and Abigail and Dorothy Sue and all the rest—had left their brains behind with their blue stockings at this or that women’s college or ladies’ seminary, their heads stuffed now with fabric swatches and bust measurements and a variety of wedding-related crises and details. Most of the graduates among them were getting married in September or October, when the weather would be perfect. Grace Spivey was firmly committed to finding a reason to be many miles from Nashville before the fall wedding season began. There was, however, one young woman whose wedding date had been moved up to sweltering June for the usual unmentionable reason, and this wedding Grace Spivey was doomed to attend. She did succeed in mortifying her mother by wearing one of last year’s gowns (while all those new ones hung unhemmed in her closet!) and by ditching her boring young escort (the son of one of her father’s colleagues in the family’s “lumber” business) as early as she could.
Grace was surveying the crystal-chandeliered ballroom (which overlooked the ninth green at the Smoky Mountain Country Club) in search of a table with a single seat available—bride’s side or groom’s, she didn’t care—when she felt a hand on her elbow. Beside her stood a little brown-haired sparrow of a woman, at least a head shorter than Grace and inappropriately dressed in a dark linen suit and sturdy-looking brown shoes.
“You look as lost as I feel,” the woman said. “Would you care to join me at the social outcasts’ table in the corner?” She might have been fifty years old, Grace guessed, but her size and subversive smile made her seem younger. The woman held out her hand. “I’m Janet Miller,” she said. “How do you do?”
Grace took the bare hand in her gloved one. “Grace Spivey. Much better than a moment ago, ma’am, thank you.”
Grace Spivey was the youngest person at the table by at least a decade or two, or three or four. She noticed that while the men were all in dinner jackets, not one pair of gloves lay limp beside the ladies’ plates. (Grace pulled hers off self-consciously and dropped them on the floor between her feet.) There was a round of introductions—“Oh, you’re Walter Spivey’s daughter—I knew your grandmother, child. A lovely woman!” Grace shook hands with the powdery woman on her left and the well-creased gentleman on her right. After that, she might as well have turned invisible for all the notice anyone took of her. The talk went on as before—such talk as Grace had never heard in Tennessee: stories of building hospitals in India, battling typhoid in China, establishing a network of women’s clinics in Japan. Janet Miller—who was Dr. Miller to the members of the Women’s World Relief Society of Nashville and their husbands at the table—was a central character in all of these stories, although she herself had little to say, compared to the others. By the time someone mentioned the doctor’s part in rescuing an Arab spy after the Great War, Grace had given up trying not to stare at the little woman across from her. The conversation had shifted into French, but Grace didn’t even notice. It diminished to whispers when the toasts and speeches began at the head table. The groom stood and toasted his bride, and finally people were free to get up and drift around the room. Grace, however, remained in her chair, her head full of snowy mountain passes and blistering desert trails and structures she imagined Japanese temples to be like, until Dr. Miller came around and settled on the edge of the empty chair beside her. They were the only two left at the table.
In the schoolhouse, the story stopped. Everybody looked at May. She said, “Next thing, Dr. Miller says something in French. I don’t recollect how to say it.” Everybody looked at Dr. Miller.
“Well, let’s see,” she said from where she sat on her desktop by the window. She swung her legs back and forth, thinking. “I suppose I asked Grace what she thought of us—or even if she understood what we were talking about.”
“You asked her in French,” May said.
“But of course.”
“Vous avez compris tout?” Dr. Miller said, waving her hand at the empty table.
“Oh, yes—oui,” Grace said. “I boarded at school in France. I understand much more than I can say.”
“Well,” said Dr. Miller, “it’s lovely to encounter a young woman of the world. I hope you’re not getting married next week.”
“Oh, no!” said Grace. “I don’t even know any men.”
“What about the young gentleman who is looking for you, I think, by the fountain? The one talking to your mother?”
“You know my mother?”
“She’s one of our biggest donors, since your grandmother passed on.”
“You’re kidding.” Grace looked at her mother across the room at exactly the wrong moment. Her mother’s face lit up and she pointed the young man toward Grace with a nod of her head.
Dr. Miller leaned closer. “I believe it was a stipulation in your grandmother’s will.”
The red-faced young man came lurching in their direction. At the other end of the ballroom, a small orchestra was tuning up.
“Oh, dear,” said Grace, but she needn’t have worried. Dr. Miller slipped an arm in hers and turned her around toward the French doors that led to the veranda overlooking the ninth hole—and the round humps of the Smoky Mountains beyond.
“We have business to discuss,” Dr. Miller said, and by the time they walked back into the clubhouse, Grace Spivey had accepted a position as Janet Miller’s traveling secretary—a six-month tour of duty that would cross three continents and expand to fill most of a year. Grace had also learned a thing or two about her grandmother Spivey, whom she had met only once, that summer in Toomsboro, and who was not, as Grace’s father once described his mother, a dotty Baptist widow lady who spent her life “sitting on a dry spot.” Before the Great War (Janet Miller told Grace), her grandmother Spivey had owned fifty percent of an estate on Skidaway Island. Her son wished to sell the estate to his father-in-law, a whiskey man from Tennessee. Now, the Baptist widow lady knew very well what the whiskey man wanted her remote stretch of island for—her home state of Georgia had been dry for years before the rest of the country followed suit—but she agreed to the transaction, keeping for herself only one small corner of the property, where her late husband had restored an old plantation home. Beatrice Spivey had bestowed the entire proceeds of the sale on the Women’s Relief Society of Nashville, and as if that weren’t enough, she had spent even more of what her son considered his money as the years went by, traveling with Dr. Janet Miller, accompanying the good doctor to many distant corners of the world until at last the Canceller of all itineraries put an end to Grandmother Spivey’s travels.
“And now I’ll step into her shoes!” Grace said happily.
“Your grandmother preferred hiking boots,” said Dr. Miller.
As they shook hands, Grace towering over her new employer, she was already picturing herself traversing jungle and savanna on the back of an elephant. Then Dr. Miller said, “But first, if you don’t mind a little detour, I have a date to keep in Baghdad.”
There were times, on the train from Basrah to Baghdad, when Grace Spivey thought she would suffocate from the heat. Or melt into a puddle. Or burst into flames. The train set out well after dark, all six windows of their compartment open, for although the hot wind smote them—smote being Dr. Miller’s word—it was preferable to the smothering heat of unmoving air. It didn’t take long, though, for sand to fill their nostrils and scour the backs of their throats raw, right through the silk scarves they’d tied around their faces. For the remainder of their twenty-hour journey, they opened a window only for a moment now and again, whenever the still heat that pressed them on all sides (as if they were packed in cotton like the artifacts Dr. Miller bought at Hillah) fooled one of them into seeking relief. During one of those moments, shortly after dawn, when the train was creeping along, as it sometimes did, no faster, Grace thought, than she herself might walk, she squinted through the scarf she had pulled over her head like a sack and saw through the mist of sand and silk a caravan of camels, hundreds of them! stretching their long necks disdainfully and lifting their knees. On every fourth or fifth beast a rider sat serenely, robes and scarves fluttering in a way that clearly suggested a breeze. Grace Spivey was enchanted. She forgot for a moment how gritty and miserable she felt.
“Arabian Nights!” she said.
Dr. Miller did not open her eyes, but she asked, “What do you see?”
“Camels!” said Grace. “At least a hundred of them.” She was counting under her breath. “Have you ever ridden one?”
“Once or twice,” Dr. Miller said faintly. “Just wait.”
When they finally arrived in Baghdad, they were installed in a hotel-pension adjacent to the home of their host, a former camel merchant for whom Dr. Miller had done a good turn once and who was now in service to His Majesty King Faisal of Iraq. From the outside, both buildings were plain yellowing stone and stucco, but inside, Grace had her own tiled room scattered with thick Persian carpets and brightly colored cushions, and equipped, like Dr. Miller’s suite of rooms, with its own gleaming bath. Droves of hotel personnel and freelance servants vied discreetly to make her wishes their command, as guests were few in the scorching summer months. The former camel merchant’s son-in-law still owned a caravanserai at the city’s edge, where Grace Spivey learned that sitting a camel, on any kind of saddle, had little to do with what she knew of riding horses. It was more like bobbing downriver on a log. She went out every day at dawn, when it was cool enough to ride, sometimes with Dr. Miller, sometimes with a guide provided by the son-in-law, and by the end of her stay, Grace had almost gotten used to the rolling gait of a pacing camel, the challenge of staying aboard while it rose to its feet, the oddness of riding with her legs dangling or tucked up under her skirt.
After each dusty dawn ride, Grace returned to the hotel and lowered herself into cool scented water drawn by unseen hands. From the bath she could see through arched windows that onion spires and gleaming tiled palaces, narrow stone streets and graceful balconies forever shaded from the sun were to be found not only in the pages of books. They were here—in Baghdad—a real place that existed in the world, a place where a Bedouin horseman might gallop by at any time, robes flying, in the street beneath her window. She slept in a bed on the rooftop and awoke every morning to a syncopated harmony of calls to prayer from all the minarets within hearing. Every morning she looked down at a labyrinth of twisting streets through which boys in ragged trousers led donkeys laden with baskets and water jars.
They were quite handsome, these boys.
To be sure, she knew there was suffering in this paradise as well. Accompanying Dr. Miller on her calls, Grace had seen goiters and tumors that distended necks and faces, she had seen malnutrition and its opposites (gout, ulcers, yellow-skinned sufferers from liver disease, a pasha—Dr. Miller’s word for him—so enormously fat that his weight had crushed his feet into blackened nubs). Grace Spivey held the bandages while Dr. Miller dressed the striped back of a boy flogged for letting his donkey run amok in the market, and while she tried and failed to stem the bleeding of an old man who paid more than the price of his hand for stealing a string of dates. She had heard Dr. Miller hold forth against the plight of women like the wives and daughters of the camel merchant, hidden from the sight of visitors behind elaborately carved wooden screens. “Prisoners in their own homes,” she said. “Hostages.”
Regarding the hidden lives of these women, Grace withheld judgment. She thought she would have liked to see what life was like behind the screen. She wondered what such women wore under the loose layers of fabric—the long cotton dress and even longer veil—that enveloped them. She wished there were a way to ask these questions. If only she spoke the language, she could ask the “little married ladies”—as Dr. Miller called the women in the household of their host next door.
“A harem?” Grace asked about them, more eagerly than she meant to.
“I can tell you they’re not all his wives. He’s not that wealthy.”
Dr. Miller guessed that the group was a mix of two or three wives plus sisters, in-laws, grown-up daughters, visiting cousins, and the like. Grace had regular roof-to-roof commerce with some of them. This was a matter of smiling and waving and holding up objects—mostly items of clothing—for comparison. The little married ladies were very interested in Grace’s underclothing. She had stood on a stool to give them glimpses of her stockings and garters and petticoats—she had even held up a brassiere, which left some of her friends collapsed in giggles on their rooftop—but aside from leaving their faces unveiled for her, they had not reciprocated with any disclosures of their own.
One morning in Baghdad, standing in the street in front of the hotel, Grace found her path blocked by a donkey laden with a pair of huge water jars and led by a slender boy whose dark eyes were full of amusement, a dirty scarf tied haphazardly over his hair. It was not the first time she’d encountered a water boy and his donkey in the narrow street—one side of the hotel overlooked a water gate that opened to the Tigris—nor was it the first time one of the handsome boys smiled at her, but it was the first time that anyone in Baghdad ever handed her a folded piece of paper. “For me?” she said, and looked around. The boy grinned but had nothing to say. She unfolded the thick linen paper. In Roman letters—neatly printed if slightly odd, the inky black tail of each letter linking it to its neighbor—the note said only, Look up. She did. Arrayed along the wall at the edge of their roof next door to the hotel, the little married ladies were looking down at her. One of them was leaning over, beckoning to Grace, her hand sweeping like a broom toward the back of the building: Go around to the garden door.
Grace saw and obeyed. A gate in the stone wall swung open before her, and in she went.
It was lovely inside: a tile-lined pool, roses, plane trees near the water, mulberries along the walls. There was nobody in sight. She could see what must be the garden door just beyond the roses. It, too, swung open and the instant she stepped inside, darkness fell over her. She was caught in what appeared to be a great black sack! Many hands grabbed at her through the cloth, pushing and pulling her, half dragging her up the stairs. She would have been more than momentarily frightened but for this: she recognized the whispers and giggling of the little married ladies all around her.
Most of them, Grace learned, were not married at all. Of the eighteen women she encountered behind the carved wooden screens in the former camel merchant’s house, five were married, but only two to the camel merchant. The “harem” included eleven of his fourteen daughters, who were grown or nearly grown, his widowed sister, her daughters, and the widowed sister of one of his wives. In addition, visiting for a time from another city was the eldest daughter of the camel merchant, now married, born of his first and older wife. This married daughter—a still-lovely woman approaching the end of her youth—had written the note the water boy delivered. Grace didn’t think to ask where the former camel merchant’s daughter had learned to write and speak English, so pleased and excited was she by her sudden admission to this forbidden world of which Dr. Miller disapproved. That it seemed a surprisingly ordinary world—unveiled, the “married ladies” looked like ordinary women, some very young, some older, some pretty, others plain—disappointed Grace just a little. She allowed herself to be seated on a fat cushion, surrounded by girls and the younger women, most of whom wore what looked like silk pajamas. A few wore long muslin gowns. One of the youngest, a girl of ten or twelve in bright yellow silk, brought her a flavored ice on a silver tray. Everyone watched her have a taste—it was sweetened lemon—and they all sat back as one, smiling, when she lifted the spoon with approval and delicately licked her upper lip.
“It is to your liking,” the English-speaking daughter of the camel merchant announced. “You are from the South United States, you and your mistress, is it not?”
“My what?”
“Your mistress. The medical lady. The Doctor Miller.” She paused, considering. “The one we call Sparrow.”
“Do you? That’s perfect! She is like a sparrow,” Grace said. “Your English is excellent. We’re from Tennessee.”
“Ten-of-sea.”
“That’s very close. Tennessee.” She spelled it.
The other woman—Aresah, she said, was her name—traced the letters in her palm as Grace pronounced them. Aresah wore a ring on every finger and bracelets thick with stones. “Tennessee,” she said. “Tennessee.” She looked up briskly, her long earrings swinging. “I know a story from the Southern of United States. It is an island, this Ten of Sea?”
“No, but we have mountains. Tennessee is a mountainous state.”
“The story of mine takes place on an island in the ocean beyond the desert, beyond Sinai, beyond Egypt and all the lands of Africa, far, far to the west of the setting sun.”
“It’s not in Tennessee, then,” said Grace. “Not if it’s an island, I mean. It could be an island off the coast, though. There’s a whole string of them off South Carolina and Georgia—”
“That one! If you excuse me. Georgia.”
“You know a story that takes place in Georgia?” Grace said. “How did—Have you been there?”
And to Grace Spivey’s everlasting astonishment, the lovely Aresah leaned closer—Grace could smell sandalwood and cinnamon—and whispered, “Yes!”
She had a gift for someone who lived there, the camel merchant’s daughter said, producing from a pocket in her long gown a red cap made of thick felt, as round and plain as a flat-bottomed bowl. The cap was for a young man—a tall, dark, handsome young man, she said. “He tends camels in the Circasus. Do you know a person such as this?
“No, I don’t,” Grace admitted.
The other woman looked disappointed. She turned the red cap around and around in her bejeweled hands. “It was to be a parting gift,” she said with a sigh. “But we did not meet again in time.”
Grace, who wanted very much to hear the story, said, “I’ve been to the coastal islands. People build fancy houses on those islands. We used to visit them when I was a child. People my mother knows. My mother knows everybody.”
Aresah brushed the flat top of the red cap, smiling. Her rings caught the light. “This man—who tended camels?—he was not fancy. Not rich.”
“But maybe, if you tell me more, I’ll get an idea about who it might be.”
Aresah raised her chin in a signal to the pair of young ladies who were sitting very close to a wooden door inlaid with ivory birds and brass foliage. From the way they leaned toward the door and then straightened to nod at Aresah, Grace suddenly realized that they were keeping watch. She would have liked to ask what they were watching for and what would happen if it appeared, but she didn’t get a chance. The former camel merchant’s daughter had already begun to tell her
The Camel Merchant’s Tale
In the Arabian desert east of Mecca, there dwelt at one time a camel merchant who cared nothing for warriors and battles but loved only his two wives, his fourteen daughters, his widowed sister, her four sons, and, above all, his many camels, so many that the ground around his tents was known to tremble with their footsteps. His name was Abu Bakr ibn Saad. With his wives and sister and nephews and daughters, he had driven one thousand camels from the desert east of Mecca to the wells west of Basrah, where they now rested, having traveled over five hundred miles in only three days’ time. How, you ask, could such a feat be accomplished? The answer dwelt in the throat of the boy Ghanim, youngest of the camel man’s nephews, a boy whose singing put any camel who heard it into a trance, a headlong galloping trance that made the poor beast race heedless over the sand, no matter how heavy its burden, never stopping to rest or graze or drink. The boy Ghanim could drive camels to their deaths with his singing—indeed this had happened once—but Abu Bakr had learned through such misfortune to use his nephew’s voice judiciously. Now, at Basrah, his camels would rest and graze a full week before they moved on to Baghdad, giving the camel man, his wives, his widowed sister, and his nephews and daughters a chance to catch up on news and gossip with friends and kin.
It was here by the wells west of Basrah that the camel merchant first learned of the outbreak of war between the Ottomans and the English. Son of a Badawi of the Aniza tribe, a man who carried all his wealth on the feet of his camels, Abu Bakr ibn Saad dwelt far enough from any town or village to be ignorant of the latest quarrel between the Turks and the English. As for the secret society of Al’Ahd, a group bent on winning freedom from the Turkish yoke for all Arab peoples (which peoples included himself), Abu Bakr ibn Saad was utterly innocent of its existence. How could he know—why would he even suspect?—that throughout Mesopotamia, the ranks of the Turkish army were led by Arab officers who wore Turkish uniforms but whose secret aim, as members of Al’Ahd, was to overthrow the Ottoman Turks? Thus did these Arab officers in Turkish clothing secretly rejoice when the British captured Basrah, and thus were they dismayed when the same British Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force made a headlong rush toward Baghdad that ended in disaster at Kut, some fifty miles short of their objective. Many and unrecorded were the attempts of the secret society of Al’Ahd, consorting with their secret British friends and allies, to rescue the British forces besieged at Kut.
One such attempt, doomed like the others, was set in motion by four Arab officers in Turkish uniforms who galloped up to the tent of Abu Bakr ibn Saad near the camel wells west of Basrah and offered him their congratulations. He had been chosen to honor his Arab people once again by rescuing the brave but foolish Englishmen who had outrun their supply lines at Kut and now were besieged by the Turks.
Hiding his confusion, Abu Bakr invited the four to enter his tent and refresh themselves. Chosen once again? he thought.
“Saving the English?” he said cautiously. “But are they not infidels and enemies of the sultan?” At this, all four Arab officers leaped to their feet. Having no time for explanations or persuasion, three drew their pistols and one a substantial bag of coins from inside the coat of his uniform.
“You have but two paths from which to choose, old man,” one of the officers told Abu Bakr, holding up the bag of gold. “You can take this in payment for your camels and flee with your family on the ship that awaits you in the harbor. Or you can stay here and perish with all you hold dear.”
What could Abu Bakr do? Either way, his camels were forfeit. These officers might indeed be Arabs, as they claimed, but they were city people, he could tell, ignorant about camels. He feared for his exhausted herd in their hands. Both he and they were ignorant of another and perhaps even more important circumstance, namely, that the Abu Bakr whom they sought—long a supplier of camels and information to the British, the one who had often borne messages from Mecca sewn into the soles of his sandals or hidden in the horn of a saddle or the hilt of a sword, the Abu Bakr whose camels were well rested and fed and ready to march to Kut—that Abu Bakr had been captured some days previous by Ottoman soldiers (real Turks in Turkish uniforms) together with all of his herds. These Arab officers, with their pistols and their bag of coins, had forced the hand of the wrong camel man. When the nephew Ghanim, he of the dangerously effective camel-driving voice, offered himself in a burst of patriotic fervor to the Arab cause, the heart of our Abu Bakr (a man named, like so many others, for the father-in-law of the Prophet) sank even lower.
As soon as the secret members of Al’Ahd rode off with their young compatriot into the desert, a thousand camels plodding in long lines behind them, and the boy Ghanim’s mother weeping vociferously in Abu Bakr’s ear, the camel merchant gathered his two wives and fourteen daughters, his weeping sister and her three less adventurous sons, and, loading what they could on the two prize camels that remained to him, he led his little entourage—all that was his in the world—into the city and through winding back streets to the shining sea. With half the bag of English gold, he bought passage for them all, as he was told to do, on a steamship whose flag he did not recognize but whose destination, learned from the ship’s first officer with the help of a noisy group of Arab sailors on the docks, was an ancient and familiar one.
While a thousand camels stumbled in the desert, the ship that bore Abu Bakr and his wives and sister and nephews and daughters steamed down the dark blue waters of the Persian Gulf and entered the Arabian Sea. Soon the ship would be sailing up the Red Sea toward Suez, after which it would turn left into the Mediterranean and proceed to Gibraltar and the great ocean beyond, its hold full of bundled dates and little palm trees. When the Arab sailors said “Georgia,” Abu Bakr understood them to mean the ancient home of the Mamluk pashas and birthplace of his second wife, the blue-eyed Dunyizad. Much too late would he discover that the ship that dipped and rose beneath his feet was an American one, neutral in the present war and bound for home. And he would never know (though it would have come as no surprise to learn) that the body of one Abu Bakr Ibn Saïd—the unlucky camel-driving spy for whom this passage had been carefully arranged—was already headless beneath the waters of the Shatt al-Arab, already tumbling with the current toward the blue, blue Gulf.
A chain of barrier islands protects the coast of Georgia from the scouring waves of the gray Atlantic. From the port of Savannah, the islands extend in a dotted line south to Florida. They have names like Tybee, Skidaway, Wassaw, Ossabaw, Sapelo, Blackbeard, and Jekyll. Some are no bigger than a single hummock of black needlegrass. Others were big enough in days gone by for plantations of sugarcane, indigo, cotton, and rice. Later, they were big enough for palatial homes and hunting grounds owned by captains of industry and their heirs; big enough for rice plots and vegetable gardens tended by descendants of African slaves; big enough, too, for bootleggers’ hideouts and for Arab “spies”—after all, why not?—in need of refuge. After an uneventful ocean crossing and a stop in the Bahamas to load sugarcane, the American ship that rose and dipped beneath the feet of Abu Bakr ibn Saad set a course for Savannah, but before the pilot boats guided it into port, it steamed around Wassaw to Skidaway, there to unload a few pallets of cargo, two prize camels, and a huddled group in long robes and veils and desert headdress.
Stepping ashore, they were gawked at—“Lord have mercy! Look what come with the dates!”—until two great canvas-covered wagons pulled by oxen arrived to carry them away. With the wagons came a motorcar freshly spattered with mud. (Already they could see that they had come to a strange and damp place.) Unintelligible men in military uniforms emerged from the motorcar and saluted Abu Bakr ibn Saad. They urged him to enter the vehicle—and he was inclined, after all the saluting, to comply—until he saw that the white-haired gentleman who already occupied half of the backseat was in fact a hatless woman dressed, to his amazement, in something like knickers and hiking boots. Abu Bakr rode instead in the wagon with his camels, standing, as they did, his face pressed into the shoulder of first one and then the other of his two old friends. That night, in a cool damp building fragrant with hay, surrounded by his soundly sleeping family, Abu Bakr dreamt as he would dream for many nights to come, of a desert strewn with camel bones.
Often, during their first months on the island, Abu Bakr was summoned to “a dwelling as big as a palace,” he told his wives, to meet with various men, some in uniforms, others not. At first these men refused to believe that he could not understand their English words. (The other Abu Bakr, unhappy fellow, had been schooled in London as well as Istanbul.) Finally—though reluctant to draw the attention of these men to his daughters and wives—Abu Bakr brought with him to one such meeting his oldest daughter, a girl of fifteen who had spent two years in service to a British lady in Qurnah and there learned to speak the language of the infidels. With her help and many long pauses, Abu Bakr could at last be questioned and his answers understood. It soon became evident to all that numerous mistakes had been made. Clearly, this Abu Bakr ibn Saad was not the camel agent with whom the British had previously done business. For his part, Abu Bakr learned just how needlessly his herd had perished. Far from being rescued, the British forces besieged at Kut had been starved and sickened (the heat, the sand flies) into surrender. Just a few months after the Arab agents seized the wrong Abu Bakr, Kut fell to the Turks, securing its dark place in British military history as the most spectacularly bungled episode of the war in Mesopotamia.
For Abu Bakr ibn Saad, it was a great relief to stop pretending that he knew who he was supposed to be and what was going on in the minds of the infidels. He was also happy to hear that when the Turks had been defeated and the Arabs installed as rightful rulers of the region, he and his large family would be returned to their home. He might have been less happy had he known it would take years for these things to come to pass.
In the meantime, while they waited (and waited), there was a great deal for people of the desert to get used to on a steamy coastal island. They were astonished, first of all, by the abundance of sweet water—streams and ponds and puddles everythere, the rain, the moss, the marsh, the green. And the island was a noisy place, the sea itself drowned out by the roar of frogs and insects every evening. (“What is that? Abu? Abu!”) They marveled at the trills and cries of the birds—woodpeckers tapping and gulls screaming during the day, owls hooting in their spooky way at night—the chattering of squirrels, the almost ceaseless whisper of leaves overhead, the faint clicking and clattering of fiddler crabs scooting in great numbers across a salt marsh or a tent floor, the shriek of the wife or daughter whose bare foot encountered them there. They lived in tents they had brought with them until the first hurricane season swept half their tents into the sea. Praise God the Merciful and All-Forgiving, no one perished, neither human nor camel. They moved then to the two-story barn and sturdy cabins their host (a rich American, they were told, who owned this island) had roofed and repaired for them. The barn was enough like the caravanserai they knew from Basrah—the two camels stabled downstairs and people dwelling above—that the wives of Abu Bakr ibn Saad now felt as though they had moved up in the world. When the rains came and the winds blew, they felt much safer—drier, too—sheltered by walls that were two feet thick.
From the fishermen on the island—whom the little girls called sudani, meaning blacks—the nephews and daughters of Abu Bakr learned how to catch bluegills and bass in the lagoons and the river, flounder and perch in the sea. The girls, who knew how to wait, became quite skillful at spying mussels in the mud and oysters in the tidal pools. (The trouble was, as they soon learned, they were expected to eat them afterward.) As months went by, the wives and daughters and sister and nephews of Abu Bakr ibn Saad learned to survive encounters with alligators (best seen from a distance, they’d learned); with a dozen different kinds of snakes, all of which they avoided, whether venomous or not; with turtles, which made them laugh, carrying their houses on their backs, “Like camels do for Badawi!” the little girls said; and with the small green lizards that sunned themselves on every wall, to which the girls gave names like “Yellow Eyes” and “Lost His Tail.”
Abu Bakr continued to meet from time to time with various men—some in uniform, others not—and once with the white-haired lady (dressed more decently this time), who smiled sweetly while she spoke with Aresah. (The lady owned the island, his daughter told him afterward). Over time, the summons to the dwelling like a palace came less and less frequently. Abu Bakr was beginning to think that he and his family and his camels might have been forgotten on the island they thought of as Georgia-across-the-sea, when, almost four years after their exile began, men came with word that they could soon return home, not to a wandering life in the desert but to a position of honor and salary as camel driver for the new king in Baghdad.
“If only we could get there!” his first wife Fatima was heard to moan.
For, as luck would have it, Abu Bakr’s second wife, blue-eyed Dunyizad of the Caucasus, was found to be with child. Remembering her previous confinement—a pregnancy as difficult and harrowing as any siege or battle—they could not think of setting out across the ocean with her, and although his first wife Fatima wrung her hands in anxious disappointment, the truth was that not every member of Abu Bakr ibn Saad’s large family was as eager as she to leave the island behind.
Most certainly his eldest daughter Aresah—Reesha to her friends, of whom she had exactly one—did not want to go.
The young man had simply appeared one morning, riding toward her across the salt flats on a camel—a camel!—boy and beast shimmering before her astonished eyes like a mirage. He had heard about them only recently, he said: Arabs with camels on Skidaway Island. He came to learn a thing or two.
“You don’t understand a word I’m saying,” he apologetically assumed.
Hastily covering her face, she did not contradict him.
She took him to her father, who sat on a bench with his back to the sun-warmed wall of the two-story barn, their caravanserai. When Abu Bakr ibn Saad pointed to himself and said his name, the young man repeated the name, perhaps to be sure he had heard it right, and bowed a little. He was at least a head taller than her father, somewhat darker in complexion, with curly hair and eyes that were a surprising honey-brown. (Later he would tell her that color was called “hazel.”) He pointed to himself and said, “Andrew McComb. But my daddy’s name is Andrew, so folks call me Andrew Mack.” (She repeated silently: An-Drew-Mack.) Using gestures, they offered him a meal—they were Badawi, after all—and he accepted, pleased to sit down with Abu Bakr ibn Saad and his nephews. He ate the rice and trout with obvious enjoyment. After the meal, the men took him down to the pasture—a sandy expanse of cordgrass—to meet their camels. Omar, the bull, stood and blew his dulaa at them like a child sticking out his tongue. The nephews cheered and smirked at each other. The young man was impressed. His gelding did not engage in such displays.
When he was ready to leave, Aresah and a retinue of her veiled sisters walked with him to the sunny spot where his camel, a knobby creature of considerable age, was resting. They all watched as he attempted to convince his knobby-kneed camel to lie down so he could hoist himself up onto the folded rug that served him for a saddle. When he gave up and led the camel to the fence to climb aboard, Aresah stood on tiptoe to say, “Oosh!” in the camel’s ear. The camel dropped down at once on the joints of his forelegs, like a person dropping to his knees, after which he bent his hind legs to bring his hindquarters down, and finally—step three—he lowered his forequarters the rest of the way, settling himself on the ground.
“Look at that!” said Andrew Mack. “How’d you do that?”
She said, “All camels speak Arabic.”
It took him a second or two to realize that she had uttered a sentence that he understood. “You can talk!” he said. She squinted at him. “English, I mean. But—how’d you do that with the camel? What did you say?”
“Oosh,” she said. The camel’s ears twitched. “How do you call your camel”?
“Just by his name,” said Andrew Mack.
“What is his name?” she asked him.
“Abraham Lincoln.”
“Ibrahim,” she said. “I know this name. I am Aresah.”
“Reesha?” was what he heard, and like that, she had a new name to go by. Andrew Mack threw his leg over the neck of his reclining camel and settled himself on the folded rug. Then he lifted his cap and said, “Pleased to meet you, Reesha. And all the rest of you girls.”
She said, “Please to meet you, Andrew-Mack!” Her sisters echoed this with varying degrees of success.
“Is there a word to make him git up?”
“Yek!” she said, and Abraham Lincoln rocked himself up to stand, tossing Andrew Mack backwards and forwards and back in the process.
The look on his face apparently called for another chorus of giggles.
A few days later, Andrew Mack McComb returned to the island on a she-camel named Susie (with Abraham Lincoln in tow for the ride home), having made it clear, he hoped, to Abu Bakr ibn Saad that the Browning Brothers Circus would be happy to pay a price to breed Susie with the Arabs’ bull. It was a very delicate business to discuss, and thus, Reesha had disappeared after their exchange of greetings. He worried that he might not get to speak to her at all, but when business was concluded, Abu Bakr and the cousins vanished in their turn, and it was Reesha who reappeared to show Andrew Mack how to saddle and mount and pack and feed and groom a camel in the Badawi way.
Lessons over, they set out for a ride, he on Susie and she on Gamala, the Arabs’ she-camel, with two younger sisters piled on behind her and another in front holding the tall saddle horn. She let him lead the way, giving Gamala a gentle tug on the lead rope whenever she stretched out her neck to nip the flank of his little she-camel. The younger sisters giggled every time this occurred. They rode on the beach first, taking the camels so close to the surf that they all felt spray and tasted salt on their tongues. Then Andrew Mack showed them the floating bridge he rode across the narrows to get to the island. “It’s not always in the same spot, though,” he warned. “Bootleggers move it.”
“Boot leggers?”
“That’s not a word to be repeating,” he said.
For his part, he was surprised at how easily she sat on the camel, in her long dress and veil that, together, covered her head to toe. They returned by way of Big Ferry Road. After the beach, the road was as cool and shady as a tunnel, their camels’ wide feet padding silently on the sandy surface. Live oaks held draperies of moss over their heads. Later, when they were at the barn, pulling sea oats from the camels’ tails and checking between their toes for shells or burrs, she asked him, “Where are you when you are not here, An-drew-Mack?”
She said his name in three even parts, like three pebbles, tapping one against the other. He noticed that the little sisters had disappeared.
“I just come on over from the circus grounds. We’re right near the old Wormsloe plantation. How long have y’all been here on the island?”
Reesha crouched down to get a closer look at Gamala’s front feet. “What is the…Circasus?”
“The circus,” he repeated. “Most of the show’s on the road this time of year, but I could take you all over to see what’s there—you and your sisters, I mean. Cousins, too, if they want. It’s not far. Just a few miles, on the mainland.”
“What of the camels?” She looked up, brushed her hands on the front of her long dress. “They, too, come from the Circasus? Is it a desert place?”
He considered her eyes, above the face veil, to see if she was teasing him. He could tell, usually, if she was biting her lip or hiding a smile. “No,” he said, “it’s not a desert. How long’ve you been out here anyhow?”
Instead of answering, she turned from Gamala to hobble Susie’s front legs. “Reesha,” he said, but she didn’t look his way. He had been warned by old Mr. Browning at the circus not to ask the Arabs what they were doing here. To change the subject, he went to his saddlebag, which was hanging over the fence, and drew out a wooden box about the size of a family Bible. “I’ve got something to show you,” he said.
Leaving the camels loosely hobbled and nibbling on cordgrass near the barn, they walked past sweet gum and palmettos to the ruins of the old plantation kitchen, and after poking in the grass to make sure there were no snakes, he brushed a few loose shells off the top of the tabby wall and they sat down, side by side, with a clear space between them, the box resting on Andrew Mack’s knees. It was made of heart pine, smoothed and darkened to gold by handling. Boxy letters spelling MALCOLM MCCOMB were neatly carved into the lid. “That’s my granddaddy’s name,” he said, running his fingers over the letters. He opened the box and lifted out a tattered cloth purse so old and worn you couldn’t say what color it once was. Its long braided handle was knotted together in a dozen places. Inside the purse was a large leather wallet, the size of a book, which he drew out. He pulled on a ribbon that held the flap shut and a flattened roll of yellowing paper welled up inside the wallet, several pages it appeared to be, soft as cloth. “There’s ten of these papers in here,” he said, sliding them out and offering them to her. Reesha, who had a sprinkling of sweat drops that sparkled across the bridge of her nose, opened her hands, palms up, and accepted them. Carefully, she unrolled the pages. Discovering that she had to turn them sideways, she did so. She peered at the page on top.
“It is Arabic!” she said.
“That’s what you all speak, ain’t it?”
“Where do you get this?” she asked. A very distinct little V had appeared between her eyebrows.
“It belonged to my great-great-grandmother. She got it from her daddy. He’s the one knew your language. It was on account of his religion. They had to read their holy book. My granddaddy Malcolm told me.”
Andrew Mack watched Reesha as she carefully lifted the first page to see the next one, her eyes still frowning. “This is not Qur’an.” She glanced at him. “Not Holy Book.”
He craned his neck toward the page she had on top, the one with the stain over most of the drawing. A long tear up the bottom of the page had been fixed with little strips of paper pasted between the lines, like stitches. “Can you read it?”
She sighed and shook her head. “Badawi girls do not learn this. I can read some of English now, thanks being to lessons. No Arabic. My father, he knows, but only to read Qur’an.” She lifted the page and studied the next drawing. “In Qur’an, there is no picture.”
“I believe the writing is directions for making the things in the pictures.”
“Yes! I think is right. See this?” she said, giving him permission to lean closer, which he did. “It is a thing for…these.” She pretended to pour.
“A pitcher?” He tilted his head. “What’s all that inside it, I wonder?”
“Tricks!” she said, pleased with herself for having found that word so handily. She gently flipped the pages to other drawings—a pot, an urn, a fountain filled with pipes and chambers, valves and holes. “Arabs like clever things,” she said, “tricks to fool the eyes. Wait! Wait. I have heard of such a book. My father knows some story about these book, it may be. A book of clever things.”
That’s when they heard the faint sound of Fatima, her mother, calling her name.
“I ask him,” Reesha said. She folded the pages gently and gave them back to Andrew. “Next time you tell me about…who? Who the book belongs to?”
“My great-great-grandmother. Her name was Margaret.” He picked up the purse by its many-knotted handle. “My granddaddy says she wore this around her neck with the pages inside day and night, underneath her clothes so no one could see.” He slipped the handle over his head to show her.
Reesha stood up and discreetly brushed bits of sand and shell from the back of her long dress. Her mother called again, more urgently. “I must go,” Reesha said. She turned to go back to the barn.
Andrew Mack added, “And she also wore a veil, Margaret did.”
She stopped and looked over her shoulder at him. “She wore a veil? Like this?” She put her hand to her face, touching her chin through the cloth. He could tell it was her chin. He could see the outline of her nose and cheeks. He hadn’t told a soul that he had seen her face that time on the salt marsh, when they first met. She hadn’t said a word to him about it, either.
“I reckon so,” he said. “My granddaddy says she wore it all the time, too.”
Another cry came from the upper story of the barn.
“Next time you will tell me about Margaret,” Reesha said. She turned and ran toward the cool darkness of the tabby barn.
“She met General Sherman!” Andrew Mack called after her.
From inside the barn, she called, “Next time!”
They were all waiting for him the next time, sitting on the low tabby wall: the fourteen daughters of Abu Bakr ibn Saad, his mournful sister, and both of his wives. Dressed in their abayas and veils, they looked to him like a school of brown ghosts in graduated sizes, only the little ones with their faces bare. Reesha jumped up and motioned him closer until he and she stood perhaps a camel-length apart. She spoke to the group in Arabic, then turned to Andrew Mack.
“I say we will hear of Margaret who wears a veil. What you tell in English, I tell again!”
There was so much eagerness in her eyes and voice that he said, “I reckon that might could work.” He glanced at Dunyizad, who was huge and bell-like in her long veil. She looked like a woman with no time to waste. “But it’s likely to take a while.”
“Noon prayers are past,” Reesha said. “We have many hours.”
Everyone looked expectantly at Andrew Mack.
“Well,” he said, “the story I know about Margaret—that’s my great-great-grandmomma…” He took a deep breath, during which Reesha rattled at top speed and then looked at him again. “It starts when General Sherman was marching through Georgia.” He paused while Reesha said whatever she said. “That was during the War”—he considered what to call it—“between the States.”
Reesha looked at him and frowned. “War between states? What is states?”
He lifted his cap and set it back down again. “The United States,” he said. “North”—he pointed in the direction he thought was north, and they all turned their heads or twisted around to look—“and South.” He pointed at the ground beneath their feet. They all looked down. Reesha uttered some words that sounded like rain pattering hard on a roof.
Andrew Mack continued. “Now, the War between the States,” he said, “that’s when the North said to the South, you can’t have slavery no more. So the South said, we’ll just have us our own country, then. But the North said you can’t do that neither. So the South said, we’ll just see about that, and they had them a war, which the South”—he pointed at the ground again—“lost.”
“Your people lost, An-drew-Mack?” Reesha said, surprised.
“No,” he said. “My people used to be the slaves, so they won.”
Reesha looked at her mother and said something that her mother repeated, turning it into a question. To Andrew Mack, it sounded like, “Momlook?”
Reesha turned back to him. “You?” she said. “You were slave?”
“No!” he said, and found his ears were burning. “And not my daddy, either.”
Reesha’s mother spoke again. Andrew Mack could tell that she had asked another question. He heard, “Sue Donny.” She said it again, looking at him: “Sue Donny?”
“What is she saying?” he asked Reesha.
“She asks if you are black.”
Andrew Mack looked at Reesha and then at the rest of them. From what he could see, he would have said they were brown, if he’d had to pick a color. It had not occurred to him that they might be white people. It looked as though it had not occurred to them that he was black, either. He turned to Reesha and said, “In these parts folks say ‘colored’ or ‘Negro,’ but ‘black’ is the same. You can tell her I am Sue-donny.”
She rattled some words at her mother and at the same time pushed up her sleeve and tapped the brownest part of her forearm. Her mother raised an eyebrow and folded her arms across her chest. Reesha looked at Andrew Mack.
He cleared his throat. “All right,” he said. “My granddaddy Malcolm and his grandmother, they belonged to a plantation on another island south of here—this was during slavery times—but early on in the war they all got carried over in boats and marched inland. They were up in Milledgeville when General Sherman’s army came through, so like a lot of folks, they just followed him right out of town. They were hoping to get back down to the coast. They’d left a lot of old folks behind, including some of Margaret’s sisters and all, on the island.” He let Reesha work that out somehow. Then he added, “My granddaddy Malcolm was nine years old when he and Margaret marched along through Georgia to the sea. He’s the one told me the story of how she always wore a veil, and how her daddy, who knew y’all’s language, gave her those pages from a book he had, and how she passed them on to my granddaddy Malcolm before she died, which was not long after she talked General Sherman into giving her all those circus animals—the elephant and lions and camels and all—so the Yankee soldiers wouldn’t—”
“An-drew-Mack!” Reesha cried. “What is it you speak of? What animals are these?”
“Well, that’s the story I’m fixing to tell you. About where my camels came from.”
“Not about Margaret who wears a veil?”
“She’s the one gets the camels.”
Reesha sighed. She knew that everyone was waiting to hear the title of the tale she had promised them. There was a proper order to all things, and in the telling of tales, the title came first. Knowing what she already knew, Reesha had been weaving together in her head—and looking for an opportunity to interject—a title that went something like
The Tale of the Veiled Lady, with Reference to a Book Written in the
Language of the Prophet from Which She Carried Pages
in a Bag Around Her Neck
Now, however, she threw her hands in the air and announced that Andrew-Mack McComb would beguile the long hours of the summer afternoon by telling them
The Tale of Where His Camels Came From
It was late in the year 1864. Even without the lengthy train of tattered but jubilant people walking and riding across Georgia in the wake of the army that set them free, the Federal troops led by William T. Sherman and his fellow generals made a procession so long that it took close to a full gray December day for them to pass by. The front of the line was two days’ march from Savannah when word came down the road about a rice plantation up ahead with a collection of unusual animals—the sort that most of the Yankee soldiers had only heard about but never seen. The talk was of lions and monkeys and elephants—really, there was only one elephant—and also of camels.
“Camels?” said Margaret when her grandson came to tell her what he’d heard. She was rolling along in a wooden cart not much bigger than a wheelbarrow, towed by the mule-drawn wagon in front of her. One of the Yankee soldiers had arranged the cart for Margaret, in deference to her age and solemn attire. Lately, she wasn’t feeling like herself. Her old bones couldn’t get warm, and she knew why. Until the commencement of the current hostilities, Margaret had consumed two cups of Life Everlasting tea every day of her adult life. Her sorry state right now, on one cup every other day, was proof, if anyone needed it, of the herb’s sustaining power. She was down to a single branch of dried leaves in her once-full sack, and although she sent Malcolm on foraging expeditions and kept a sharp eye on the roadside herself, no bushy plants with just the right silvery leaves could be found. Unless this army parade could carry her home in a week or less, she was sure to run out before she got there.
Her grandson Malcolm held on to the top rail of the cart’s perimeter, his bare toes clinging to the smallest of ledges over a wheel. It was some kind of shame, Margaret thought, how dirty his shirt was, how little was left of his pants. She was going to wash him for a week when they got back home.
“Lions, too!” he said. “You seen lions once.”
Had Margaret ever seen a lion? She must have told him a story borrowed from another lifetime, maybe from her mother’s. She said, “Camels saved my father’s life. They carried him across the sands to Baghdad. Malcolm, watch your foot by that wheel.”
The boy leaped sideways and waved to her from the grass along the road.
Having seen what the Yankees did to livestock, she half hoped that the rumored lions and camels were rumors only. Not that she blamed the hungry soldiers for helping themselves to as much beef and pork on the hoof as they could eat—and she could see why they didn’t want the enemy to avail themselves of animals left behind. It was the same reason some of the white farmers and planters shot their own livestock before the Yankees got there. That was the very worst, in Margaret’s opinion: coming up on a farm where all the livestock were already dead for days and stinking like a pestilence. It smelled so bad, even in December, it made the babies cry.
William T. Browning, the rice planter who was until very recently the owner of the much-discussed menagerie up ahead, used to claim that he had captured the creatures on safari in Africa and other exotic locales. The forty-six human beings of whom he had also been until very recently the owner knew better. William T. Browning’s animals had been purchased from a circus in England more than a decade before. Browning had fetched the animals across the Atlantic himself, feeling like Noah on the Ark, much to the dismay of Mrs. Browning, who expected the ship to be filled only with fine furnishings and fabrics worthy of their new home. She never fully forgave him for two hundred yards of silk on bolts that somehow ended up among the bales of straw lining the elephant’s stall.
The Brownings had already fled, leaving behind the menagerie along with their more conventional livestock and their human property—the forty-six soon-to-be ex-slaves. Mr. Browning had been urged by a neighbor to sacrifice the livestock, but he refused to do it, thanks to the persuasive powers of his animal overseer, a slender black man named Benjamin. Benjamin was remarkable not only for his skills in persuasion and animal husbandry, but for the pointed beard he kept groomed to perfection with nothing but a razor-sharp cane knife, and for his immaculately white turban. (Rafters in the barn were always festooned with lengths of white cloth hung up to dry. There were other men in the coastal areas who wrapped their heads thus, but no one wore a turban so snowy white.) Under Benjamin’s supervision, the people who were slaves on William T. Browning’s plantation had been taking excellent care of his menagerie, as well as his conventional livestock, for many years. When General Sherman arrived at the plantation one warm day in December 1864, his troops were welcomed with a sort of circus parade, the elephant and camels and their riders decked out with rags and streamers, each of the monkeys leashed and chattering on somebody’s shoulder, the two lions and one tiger pacing sluggishly in separate wheeled cages pulled along by teams of ponies.
But Margaret was right to worry. Upon seeing that collection of unusual creatures, the first thing the Yankee soldiers did was ask their superiors for permission to let the animals loose in the fields and hunt them down for sport. Their superiors wisely withheld this permission, and yet one of the lions had already been shot by a Yankee soldier pretending to be a lion tamer such as he’d seen one time at a circus in Chicago. Using a long stick and then a whip handle, he kept poking at the old beast, who was either too tired or too bored to roar, until the soldier, on a dare, got right up close and stuck his face in the sleepy lion’s face in a way that must have made the lion think that this was the part of the show where he was meant to open up wide so the human could put its head into the lion’s deadly jaws. The lion opened wide and scared the soldier so badly that he soiled his drawers and raised his pistol and closed his eyes and stuck his arm out straight and shot that lion right in the mouth, causing the poor beast to clamp his jaws shut in surprise.
You can bet that Yankee soldier told a different story, when he got home, about how he lost his arm in the war.
Malcolm came and told Margaret about it, his eyes brimming.
“Oh, baby,” she said, and he let himself be drawn into the folds of her dress, a long loose dress of the same undyed homespun as her veil. She held him close and asked, “Is he shot dead?”
Malcolm tilted his head back and looked up at his grandmother, suddenly hopeful. It hadn’t occurred to him that the lion might be shot but not dead.
“You fetch me a cup of hot water,” she said, handing him her tin mug, “and we’ll go have a look.”
By the time Malcolm returned from the cook’s wagon, walking as fast as he could with his eye on the cup, Margaret had replaced her brown homespun veil with a pale blue one that fell past her shoulders and was fixed so she could pull it across her face and keep it there. Margaret wore the blue veil as a sign of who she was, the daughter of Bilali Mahomet, faithful like her father to the Prophet, in her heart slave to no one but God. Malcolm saw it as a sign that she had hopes for the fallen lion. He held the steaming metal cup and watched her pluck leaves of Life Everlasting from a dried branch and crumble them into the water, which immediately released a pungent and familiar smell. Malcolm breathed it in, and so did his grandmother, their two heads—one round and brown, the other draped in blue—bent over the rising wisps. She stirred it with their knife, took the cup from him, and loudly sipped three times before she gave it back. He took his sip without complaining, although he didn’t like the mossy taste, only the comforting smell. The metal cup was perhaps a quarter full and his nose was still crinkled when, to his surprise, Margaret crumbled the last leaves from her branch into the cup. Tamping the mixture into a paste, she said, “Thought we’d see if our lion friend needs a little Life Everlasting.”
She pulled the veil across her cheekbones and took Malcolm’s hand. They passed wagons and horses and staring faces of every shade until they reached the fallen lion’s cage. There, the crowd parted. Voices fell silent. Not one of them—not even Benjamin the overseer in his snowy white turban—had ever seen anyone quite like this solemn woman, so straight and tall that no one would ever guess her age at well past eighty, her dark brown face half hidden by the pale blue veil.
Margaret and Malcolm stopped at the end of the wagon-cage, where four wooden steps led up to a door made of iron bars. Tall, black Benjamin came forward with a big iron key. He bowed and said, “Allahu akbar.”
Margaret’s hand went to her heart—or so it appeared. Malcolm knew what she was really reaching for. Under her dress, inside a homespun bag that she wore on a cord around her neck, were the pages her father had given to her before he died, pages from an ancient book written in the language of the Prophet. “Allahu akbar,” Margaret agreed, and she added, significantly, that God was also merciful. Then she lifted her skirts ankle-high and her bare feet climbed the steps into the cage.
Most of the dried blood was near the door, where the Yankee soldier had stood with his foolish face growing paler and paler. The crowd that watched Margaret step neatly around the bloodstains on the floor had witnessed the incident. They had all heard the shot. They had seen the lion fall. They held their breath as Margaret laid her hand on the lion’s head, and buried her fingers in his mane, and leaned to put her veiled face next to his ear. Only those closest to the iron bars heard her say softly, “Old lion, my mother knew your mother. How long have I waited to meet you?” When she told them, as she crouched beside the beast, that the lion was not dead, they did not believe her. They watched her scoop the paste from the tin cup and apply it to the lion’s cheek, in a fleshy pad of muscle just below the temple, a spot almost hidden by his mane. She straightened up slowly, and even as she told them that the lion would soon awaken, though he would not be in the best of moods, the crowd began to murmur.
Everyone had seen the right ear twitch. (Well, some saw the left.)
Margaret exited the wagon-cage with dignity but no dawdling.
Word came around later that General Sherman wished to meet the lady with the veil.
Margaret and her grandson were welcomed by the general’s orderly to the daintily decorated parlor of William T. Browning’s home and offered refreshment in the form of chicory tea (they each took a polite sip) and cookies (cookies!), which the orderly had discovered in a tin in the pantry and tested on a dog, a monkey, and himself before passing the rest of them on to the general. In turn, Margaret presented for General Sherman’s inspection the tin cup containing the leftover paste of Life Everlasting she had prepared for the lion. He sniffed it and said jovially, “So this is the potion that brought the beast back from the dead?”
“The lion weren’t dead, sir.”
The general lifted the tin cup. “And if I partake, will I have Life Everlasting?”
“Not in this world.”
“In the next?” the general persisted.
“Might could be. Add water first.”
That made him laugh. Then he leaned, just slightly, toward her. “I am told that you and Benjamin spoke to each other in a foreign tongue.”
They had exchanged only greetings and prayers—such was the extent of Margaret’s knowledge of Arabic—but it pleased her to say, “We speak the language of the Prophet.”
“Which prophet would that be? Of which religion, which god?”
“There is only one God,” she said. “Mohammed is His Prophet.”
“You are Mohammedans!” the general said with more satisfaction than surprise. “I’ve heard there are those among you, here along the coast and on the islands, who profess that faith. Benjamin—the overseer here—has a holy book. Did you know? I came upon him praying at midday and he showed it to me. He wrote it down from memory!” the general said. “In an empty ledger book. Can you imagine that? He’s kept it hidden all these years. He said Browning’s wife would have burned it.”
Margaret’s hand went to her own treasure on the cord around her neck.
“But Cook tells me that you have come with us from Milledgeville—are there Mohammedans there as well?”
“We come from the island called Sapelo.” She glanced at Malcolm. “My father was Bilali Mahomet.”
“Bilali Mahomet,” the general repeated. “It sounds like the name of a prince.”
That made Margaret smile.
General William T. Sherman ended his brief interview with the daughter of Bilali Mahomet by conferring upon her august person (those were his words in the order that made it so) the entire menagerie formerly owned by one William T. Browning. Margaret sought the help of the general’s adjutant, a young man graduated from West Point and also apprenticed in the law, to draw up an official transfer of property that recorded her sale of said menagerie—including the wounded lion, who appeared to be healing nicely—to Benjamin “Browning.” The price of purchase was one brief sura that Benjamin copied out onto an empty page removed from the back of his ledger book. Everyone watched the quill pen move slowly across the paper from right to left, leaving a trail of lovely Arabic letters that spelled out the words Margaret had requested: I seek refuge in the Lord of Daniel, Master of the lion’s den.
A few days after Margaret healed the lion, General Sherman’s army set out on the final leg of his already famous march to the sea. (Down the road, the white citizens of Savannah awaited him with bated breath and spiked punch.) Margaret’s cart was drawn by a pair of beribboned Shetland ponies now and followed by a camel on which Malcolm sat grinning triumphantly, a snow-white turban just like Benjamin’s on his head.
“They’re coming with us, Gran,” Malcolm had announced earlier, “lions and all!”
Margaret was pleased but not surprised. Neither Benjamin Browning nor General Sherman was likely to leave the animals where returning enemy soldiers and hungry country folk could find them.
By the second day of the final leg of the ever-more-populous march to the sea, Margaret wasn’t feeling well at all. The helpful adjutant found a space for her in a covered wagon, and, while she dozed fitfully in a makeshift bed, Malcolm held her hand, startled by its coolness. Earlier, she had felt hot to his touch. “Gran?” he said softly. “Are you cold?”
She turned her head on the straw pillow. “Malcolm, I need your help,” she said, and tugged at the colorful braid of cloth around her neck.
“What you doing, Gran?” he asked in alarm.
“I am removing this that I wear.”
“Why?”
“I do not wish to wear it any longer.”
“Why not?” Malcolm cried.
“It makes me itch right here.” She touched a spot where the braid went around her neck.
“Oh,” he said. “Here, lift your head, just right like that. There.”
When he had slipped the bag off her neck, he asked her where he should put it.
“Why, around your own neck, Malcolm.”
“I got to wear it now?”
“For the time being, you do.”
“What if it makes me itch?”
“It will.” Relieved of her burden, Margaret closed her eyes, and within seconds she was lightly snoring.
Malcolm did not slip the cord over his neck, not yet. Instead, he scooted closer to the end of the wagon, where an opening in the canvas cover admitted a patch of sunlight. He gently pulled the bag open along its drawstring and, turning it upside down, he let the leather wallet inside the bag slide out into his lap. Malcolm knew that his great-grandfather Bilali Mahomet—he whose name had sounded to the general like the name of a prince—had made one such wallet for each of his daughters. Each wallet contained a different set of soft linen pages like the ones that Malcolm laid out flat over his sunlit knees, pages full of funny drawings of pitchers and lamps and strange creatures with water spouting from their mouths. Malcolm also knew, having many times heard the story, that his great-grandfather, Bilali Mahomet, had copied these pages from an ancient book and then risked everything to carry them across deserts and oceans from his old life as a free Mohammedan, a life cut short in his youth.
Even as a slave—first in the Bahamas and later on the island off the coast of Georgia—Malcolm’s great-grandfather had been a figure of legend. What other slave overseer had ever been given arms to defend his master’s land, as Bilali was when English warships threatened the coast in 1812? And what other island plantation weathered the great hurricane of 1824 without the loss of a single life, Bilali having gathered people and cattle safely within the thick tabby walls? His cleverness was legendary, too. People came to Sapelo from near and far to see the fountains whose water jets changed shape—from “lance” to “shield” to “lily”—by means of ingenious mechanisms Bilali had installed, and to learn the methods he perfected for growing bumper crops of Sea Island cotton and sugarcane. An exacting taskmaster, aloof from and not altogether popular with his fellows, Bilali Mahomet practiced his religion and wrote in Arabic script and died a very old man in 1859, when his great-grandson Malcolm was four years old.
Now, at nine, Malcolm was already long of limb, like Bilali, and his face was delicate and narrow, as dark and sweet as chocolate (which he had tasted once). He was said to resemble his mother, Esme, who waited for him in Paradise. His grandmother told him long ago that a woman who died giving birth was like a soldier who gave his life in a holy war. Margaret did not add, though she believed it to be true, that her daughter’s gift was the greater, as she had brought a new believer into the world.
Malcolm couldn’t picture his mother, no matter how hard he tried, but if he closed his eyes, he seemed to remember the long cloth coat that his great-grandfather famously wore, and a round felt hat on the old man’s head. In Malcolm’s only memory of Bilali, the old man was talking with someone who looked like a pale wisp of smoke, in a place that smelled of wood shavings and bristled with pipes. That was Reverend Goulding’s carriage house in Darien, Margaret told Malcolm. She was surprised that he remembered it. “They were always building something,” she said. “He was thick as molasses with that old preacher.” Malcolm was right there, in his grandmother’s arms, when Bilali gave the preacher “that little book of his. I didn’t want him to do it,” Margaret said. It was a thin, hand-sewn notebook in which advice for growing long staple cotton shared the pages with lines that Bilali recalled from his student days so long ago, all of it written in ink concocted from the juice of pokeweed berries. The minister had accepted the little book graciously, although Margaret suspected that he believed the Arabic letters weren’t letters at all, but only an imitation of words. Later, she asked her father why he had given his notebook to a man prevented by ignorance from reading a single word. Margaret had to smile when she told Malcolm her father’s answer: “I give it, my daughter, to show pig-eating Nazarenes that we are a people of learning.”
About the other book, the one Bilali had copied in his youth, the one whose remaining pages fluttered now on Malcolm’s knees in the back of a covered wagon belonging to the victorious Federal army of the United States of America, of that one, Bilali had said to his daughter: “This book of ancient learning is ours alone.”
After a while, the weight of family history made Malcolm’s eyelids heavy. He had just leaned back, almost dozing, against the foot of his grandmother’s makeshift bed, when the opening in the back of the canvas-covered wagon was suddenly filled by the head and long neck of a camel! Malcolm barely had time to sit up straight in surprise before the camel withdrew its head so abruptly that one of the pages on Malcolm’s lap fluttered up and flew right out the wagon after it. Less than a moment later, there in the opening formerly filled by the camel, was Benjamin Browning, his turban as snowy as ever and a look of dismay on his face, the wayward page pinched delicately between his thumbs and forefingers. A wet stain made at least a third of the paper translucent, so the outlines of a drawing—a pitcher or teapot, it appeared to be—showed through the back. Malcolm scrambled to fold the pages still in his lap and then reached for the one that hung in the air from Benjamin’s fingers like a shirt on a clothesline, but instead of relinquishing it, Benjamin studied the drawing, frowning at it, until a snort and a cough brought him and Malcolm both up short.
“Who is it?” Margaret wheezed. “Who’s there?”
“It’s Benjamin, Gran.”
“How do, Miz Margaret? How’re you feeling?”
“Fine,” Margaret said. She struggled to sit up, then decided against it. “No worse,” she amended. “What is that there?”
Benjamin handed the page to Malcolm as he answered. “Unless my eyes deceive me, it looks like a page from the Kitab al-Hiyal!”
“Ah,” said Margaret. “I reckon my grandbaby’s showed you his birthright.”
Benjamin asked, “Wherever did you get it?”
“Well, now,” Margaret said, “I believe Malcolm could tell us that story.”
Malcolm was immediately seized by shyness. It was one thing to tell a story to his grandmother, pausing at the parts that were tricky to remember, waiting for her to fill in forgotten details. It was quite another to have her listening while he told the story to someone else. And what did she mean by his birthright? Her bright eyes were on him, though, and so he said, reluctantly, “I reckon I could tell it.”
“You reckon?”
“Yes, ma’am, I surely could.”
“That’s better. Help me with this pillow first,” she said, “and then begin.” He fluffed up her flour-sack pillow for as long as he could. Then he closed his eyes to think.
Margaret and Benjamin waited.
Malcolm gave up. “What was the year?”
“In the 1,187th year of Hijra,” Margaret said.
“In the 1,187th year of the Hedge Rah—that’s about the same as 1775, give or take—the father of Bilali Mahomet made up his mind to visit the holy places before the world came to an end.” Malcolm leaned closer to Benjamin and added softly, “They thought that was about to happen back then, but it didn’t.”
“Not yet it hasn’t,” Margaret said without opening her eyes.
“God alone knows the time,” said Benjamin.
Malcolm sat up straight and proceeded to tell, as best he could, the following
Tale of Bilali and the Book of Ingenious Devices,
Which Is Also
a Tale of Escapes and Near-Escapes
You hear of kings and sultans who undertake the hajj, as the Prophet has instructed, setting out for Mecca from the ends of the earth, with their scribes and viziers, their slaves and their followers, with camels numbering a hundred or more, all bearing goods and gold through the desert. The father of Bilali had no slaves, no followers, and certainly no camels, not even one, and yet he, too, resolved to make his pilgrimage. Although he was named Ahmad Baba—in honor of the famous scholar who owned a thousand books—the father of Bilali owned only one book, the Qur’an he himself had copied line by line, sura by sura, in his student days in Timbo. Those were the days when, as a youth, Ahmad Baba disappointed his own father, a modestly prosperous merchant who’d hoped to see his fortunes increased by a son with a head for business. Those days were long ago. Ahmad Baba had no talent for the art of buying and selling. His magic was in his hands, his instincts in his fingers (particularly when they held tin snips or a metalworking hammer); his mind was in thrall to the making of things. To look at Ahmad Baba now—a middle-aged man coaxing a sheet of copper into the shape of a pitcher or bowl, or sharpening the iron curve of a scythe, or even using the scythe to harvest a grassy field—you would never guess from his dirty tunic and sweat-stained turban that his mind was in perpetual ferment. Every stone and stick and water jar spoke to Ahmad Baba of things he had never seen, things for which he had no name: things like concentric siphons and conical valves, crankshafts and feedback controllers, floats and fail-safe systems, even self-trimming oil lamps.
Ahmad Baba’s firstborn son Bilali—named by his mother for the Prophet’s first muezzin—was cut, it seemed, of the same cloth as his father. But with this difference: Where Ahmad Baba sensed potential in stick and stone and jar, it was his son Bilali who could see the way to bring potentiality into actuality. Already, by the age of twelve, the boy had contrived—and his father had subsequently fashioned—a metal aqueduct that began at a bubbling spring in a nearby jungle canyon and ended just outside their little house in a tank that filled itself as it was emptied, never overflowing nor wasting a single drop. The boy had saved his mother many hours of grinding labor with mortar and pestle by inventing a simple device—a crank to turn and a funnel made of brass—to husk the tiny grains of fonio from which the people of the region made their couscous, porridge, and beer. The boy was ingenious, the father skilled with his hands. Together, they could make themselves invaluable to pilgrims and merchants, even to caliphs and kings. At the very least, Ahmad Baba thought, he and his son could earn their way to Mecca, God willing, before the world came to an end, and possibly back again, if there was time.
In so doing, they might become famous like the Banu Musa, three brothers who lived in Baghdad in the Golden Age of Learning. This, too, Bilali’s father Ahmad Baba dared to dream. He had seen a copy of the Kitab al-Hiyal—the brothers’ famous Book of Ingenious Devices—during his student days in Timbo, when a visitor from Baghdad came to work with scholars on deciphering the ancient script. He had never seen a picture in a book before. These were line drawings of things like containers and lamps—fountains, too, with animal heads called “idols” by the scholars who studied the text. The pictures themselves suggested secret, ingenious, and perhaps forbidden powers hidden inside each device: sinuous tubes, curved handles, pitchers and pots with round bellies and narrow necks and all manner of chambers and passages inside. The objects floated on the lines of script around them like vessels riding waves in the sea. When the visitor who brought the book from Baghdad spoke of the House of Wisdom, where the Banu Musa had worked and studied, Ahmad Baba didn’t know if it was a place that still existed or one that had closed its doors in ages past. He knew only that he wished to go there, to stand where the sons of Musa had stood and hold in his hands the Kitab al-Hiyal. How often he had done this in his dreams!
This, his heart’s desire, grew stronger as he watched his son Bilali grow, watched him put to use the powers of liquid and balance and timing and air, which Ahmad Baba could sense all around them. When the boy’s grandfather, still the prosperous merchant, offered to finance a trial year of study for Bilali—pinning fresh hopes on his grandson—Ahmad Baba had thanked the old man without restraint. If Bilali just once laid eyes on the Book of Ingenious Devices—well, Ahmad Baba was uncertain exactly what would happen, but he was almost sure that God willed greatness for his son, and that the key to that greatness could be found in the Kitab al-Hiyal. Not even the wife of Ahmad Baba suspected that when the time came for him to add al-Hajj to his name by making pilgrimage to the holy places, he would carry with him his dream of setting foot in the House of Wisdom with his talented son. That Baghdad lay perhaps another thousand miles beyond the holy places seemed a problem Ahmad Baba and his boy could solve when the time came. There was little they could not do, if they put their minds and hands to it, together.
Two years, he thought, should suffice for the journey, both hajj and House of Wisdom included. Three at the most. God willing.
Bilali, now a serious fellow of fourteen years, greeted the news of a pilgrimage with guarded enthusiasm. His father had come to Timbo in an oxcart (to be exchanged later for a pair of camels) that was obviously loaded for a long journey. Bilali suspected that neither his mother nor his grandfather approved of Ahmad Baba’s plan—if they knew of it at all. To show his father that he was neither a cowering child nor entirely ignorant of the world, he asked bravely, “Will we go to Shinqiti and join the caravan to Cairo?”
“Yes and no,” said Ahmad Baba.
“Yes and no?”
“We will go to Shinqiti,” his father said.
Bilali waited.
“But we will not go to Cairo with the caravan. Only to Rabat. From there”—his father paused dramatically—“we will go by sea.”
“In a boat?” Bilali said.
His father laughed. “Unless you’ve learned to swim.”
From Timbo to Shinqiti, as the grassland gave way to rocky sahel and finally to the desert, they made themselves invaluable, according to plan. Ahmad Baba repaired countless pots, knives, chain links, pitchers, and stakes with his metalworking hammers and the portable forge that his son had contrived for him. Bilali designed and his father constructed a trough like the one at home whose water supply—from any nearby stream or camel well—was cut off and reopened automatically when animals drank from it. Working together, father and son made fasteners and containers, they repaired and modified, they suggested and improved and improvised. Their little tent was frequented by merchants and pilgrims from one end of the caravan to the other, most of whom offered them a coin or two in return for their trouble. Others merely reminded them of the holy baraka they were certainly piling up in heaven by their service to God’s faithful pilgrims.
“You would think they might be more concerned with piling up blessings for themselves,” Ahmad Baba grumbled.
When they reached Shinqiti, perhaps twenty days into their journey, the caravan tripled in size, adding pilgrims and merchants in about equal numbers. Now many dozens of camels carried great baskets of rice, and others giant scabbards stuffed with tusks of ivory, or leather bags of various sizes that might have anything from gold to cola nuts inside. One whole group of camels appeared to suffer from a malady that caused thickening and irregularity of their hides, until you looked closer and saw that they were heaped with goat-and sheepskins. At least a hundred camels carried pilgrims or merchants of substance, both men and women (not on the same camel, of course), who looked out from under veiled canopies at bobbing heads and churning sand below.
At the end of the caravan, accounting for perhaps a quarter of its length, was the human cargo. Some walked without encumbrances. Others were chained. All were dark-skinned like Bilali and his father. The men covered their heads and upper bodies as best they could with lengths of cloth and tattered robes or tunics. The women were veiled, like Muslim women, from head to toe. Once, when Bilali was hurrying (as he had been told to hurry) past the contingent of slaves, he heard two women talking, speaking Pulaar, the language of his people. One of them was weeping, he could hear, and it was all he could do to keep from running up to them, although his father had forbidden him most strictly to speak or mingle with the unfortunate ones. The women Bilali overheard could not be anyone they knew, his father said. “Muslim women are not taken for these purposes.”
“But they wear the veil.”
That was to protect the trader’s investment, his father said grimly, but Bilali’s heart was not eased, not even when the dealer in ancient books—another newcomer at Shinqiti—said the slaves had come from Niger, which was no place near their village, and that, besides, Muslim women were not taken for these purposes.
“Why does the book trader know where the slaves are from?” Bilali asked his father later.
“He is a merchant among merchants. They talk. You see how he knows everyone already. Why do you ask such a question, Bilali?”
The boy hestitated. “Do you think he trades only in books?”
His father smiled. “I have heard no cries for help from inside the boxes his camels carry.”
Bilali wanted to like the book dealer. Sidi Masrur’s well-creased skin was medium brown, his beard was thin, his body so slight that his long robes seemed to be animated by the air. The sleeves all but covered his fingers. With him came six camels, each one carrying four great boxes, two balanced one atop the other on each side of the hump. If you walked close to one of the boxes and sniffed, Bilali discovered, you could smell old parchment, paper, leather covers, and dust. Whenever Sidi Masrur opened one of the boxes, the scent of ancient learning rose from it like steam from a cooking pot. Bilali would have liked to trust the man who dealt in such tantalizing merchandise.
“We are in his debt,” Bilali’s father reminded his son.
Ahmad Baba referred to the incident of the saddle, wherein they had learned that not everyone welcomed young Bilali’s ideas for improving the world. Somewhere between Shinqiti and Fez, perhaps eight or ten days into that leg of the journey, the Tuareg saddle used by all the camel drivers seized the boy’s attention. A wooden frame gave the saddle a tentlike shape to protect the camel’s hump from the crushing effects of rider and cargo. The design was more than a thousand years old.
Bilali considered the height and curvature of the saddle’s wooden frame, the triangle it formed when regarded from either end. With his eye, he measured the angle of the inverted V at the top of the triangle. He watched as camels were loaded, observed how the “tent” did or didn’t flatten out a bit, how the wooden legs of the frame pressed into a thick cushion placed underneath the saddle, padding the camel’s shoulders and hips. He made drawings with a stick in the dirt. When, in halting Arabic, he proposed to one Moroccan camel driver a small adjustment to the angle of the V, the camel driver scowled as if he might be thinking about it. Then, without warning, he spat hard into the dirt, scattering Bilali’s drawing into rolling beads of dust and saliva. He growled some incomprehensible words and lost himself in his herd. Bilali was still brushing off his sleeves when Sidi Masrur, the book trader, who had heard and seen all, told the boy that the driver had cursed him in classical Arabic for presuming to improve on God’s own design. His eyes twinkling under a greasy turban, Sidi Masrur said, “It would seem that not only the camel but the Tuareg saddle was delivered to his tribe directly from the hand of God.”
After the briefest silence, Bilali asked, “Do you believe it?”
Sidi Masrur said quietly, “I do not, but I would not say as much to my camel driver.”
Suddenly it struck Bilali that the book trader was speaking to him at this moment not in Arabic, but in Pulaar. Reading the surprise on his face, Sidi Masrur explained, “It behooves the merchant to converse with his clients in a manner that makes them feel at home. In this way, trust is built between them.” He spoke Yoruba and Hausa as well as Pulaar and several dialects of Arabic, he said.
In the interest of science and the spirit of knowledge, Sidi Masrur encouraged Bilali to go ahead and make his small adjustment to one of the saddles that bore his coffers of books. Bilali had his father make two V-shaped copper tubes, into which he fit the dowels that were formerly tied together to give the saddle its tent shape. When that one small adjustment allowed the camel to double its load without so much as blinking a double-lidded eye, every camel driver in the caravan—with the exception of the one who had cursed Bilali—got in line for their V-shaped tubes, fashioned in the portable forge of Bilali’s father from whatever copper pot or brass pitcher the camel driver could provide. In one language after another, Sidi Masrur proclaimed that the boy—sometimes he said the “sudani,” although the book trader’s skin was not much lighter than Bilali’s—was worth far more than his not-very-considerable weight in gold. Enthusiastic caravaneers and camel drivers agreed. At the time, neither Bilali nor his father was as alarmed as they should have been by these flattering pronouncements, only some of which they understood. They were too busy counting their dirhams. They now had sufficient resources to pay their way by land and sea to Mecca and back again. Ahmad Baba had not yet mentioned to his son Bilali the side trip he had in mind. Having traveled north for weeks now, and with the breadth of Africa yet to cross from west to east, Ahmad Baba had come to regard the journey to Baghdad—perhaps nine hundred miles each way—as a mere detour. He would present it thus to his son, when the time was right.
As for Sidi Masrur, trader of books and other commodities, he became their closest associate and advisor. “Regard me as your rafiq,” he said, using the word as medieval traders did, to mean companion, partner, comrade, friend. One night the three of them were sipping thick, sweet mint tea on cushions placed on the ground around his campfire of camel chips, when Sidi Masrur confided his intention to leave the Shinqiti caravan at Marrakech or Fez and proceed to the coast from there.
“We shall do the same!” said Ahmad Baba. “Do you know a boat? Perhaps we can continue our journey together, if God wills it.”
Bilali sipped his tea and tried to remember if he or his father had previously mentioned to Sidi Masrur their plans to travel by boat to Alexandria, instead of taking the overland route through the desert.
“That would be truly a pleasure,” the book trader said. He told them that once they reached Suez, he would help them find a boat bound for Jeddah, the port that was only one day’s journey from the holy places. He himself would be going on. He had been hired to procure a certain book in Baghdad, if he could, for subsequent delivery to a scholar in Tripoli who was willing to pay a big price for the ancient volume.
“You will travel to Baghdad?” Ahmad Baba said.
“Of course,” said Sidi Masrur. “Baghdad is always on the book trader’s route, especially if he seeks, as I do, the work of the Banu Musa.”
Ahmad nearly dropped his glass of tea. “The Book of Ingenious Devices?”
Bilali looked up sharply at the name of a book he had been hearing about for as long as he could remember. He felt a flush of shame at the meagerness of his efforts to find a copy of it for his father during his own year in Timbo.
“You know it?” Sidi Masrur sounded pleased. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Not when your own boy could himself be a son of Musa bin Shakir, for all his cleverness!” The book trader’s pale and suddenly unreadable eyes slid over to Bilali and rested on him. “Not that the father is anything but worthy of such a son.”
Bilali knew what was coming next. He tried to signal his father to keep quiet, but Ahmad Baba could not resist saying, in a whisper, “I have seen the Kitab!”
Sidi Masrur’s whole face darkened for an instant. “Where?” he asked.
“Truly, sir, it was in Timbo,” said Ahmad Baba. “In my student days.”
When he turned to Bilali, Sidi Masrur’s face had regained its even expression. “You’ve only just come from learned Timbo, have you not? Did you, too, lay eyes on the Kitab of the Banu Musa there?”
“I inquired,” Bilali said, and this was true, he had, “but no one knew of it.”
“Perhaps your father saw it in a dream,” the book trader said. He threw back his head and drained his glass.
“I saw it,” Ahmad Baba said firmly. “It was a large book, in size like a shield.”
“Like a shield?” Sidi Masrur sounded doubtful.
“A small shield.” Ahmad Baba continued, switching for some reason from Pulaar to his slow and deliberate Arabic. “It has a cover of leather that once was red. Some pages are torn. Some ink is faint.” He paused the width of a breath. “Inside the book, there are pictures. One hundred pictures,” he said, “of one hundred devices.”
Sidi Masrur nodded slowly, like a man convinced. “You have seen it,” he said.
As it happened, the book trader knew a great deal about the Book of Ingenious Devices and even more about the Banu Musa who had written it. “Their father, Musa—or Moses, as the Christians say—began his career as a highwayman, making the roads unsafe in Khurasan.”
“No!” said Ahmad Baba in dramatic disbelief, although Bilali had heard this same story from his father many times.
Later, when father and son were rolled up in their blankets for the night, Bilali asked his father if he had ever mentioned the Book of Ingenious Devices to Sidi Masrur—“before tonight, I mean.”
After a long silence, Ahmad Baba said, “Perhaps I did.”
Over their heads, the sky was milky with stars, and although cold air touched their faces, the sand beneath them was still warm. Bilali waited a moment before he asked, “Baba, do you think the book trader is really looking for the Kitab al-Hiyal? Do you think he really has a customer who wishes to buy it?”
“Of course. Why would he say so if he did not?”
“To win our trust?”
“Bilali, I will tell you what I believe about Sidi Masrur. I believe he is our rafiq. I believe that God has sent him to us. If we hadn’t met Sidi Masrur, I would not even know that it is possible to go almost the whole way by boat.”
“But that was always our plan,” Bilali said. “To go by boat.” How many times had he rehearsed the route in his mind? In Rabat they would find passage on the sea to Egypt—a voyage of many weeks. In Egypt there would be a three-day journey overland from Cairo to Suez, and then another boat to the Red Sea port of Jeddah, and after that just one day’s camel ride to Mecca. Most of the time they would be on the water, or so Bilali hoped fervently. After walking alongside their laden camel from Timbo to Shinqiti, and from there almost to Fez, he was looking forward with his whole being to pressing the tired soles of his feet to the deck of the long-promised boat.
“Oh, yes, surely, to Jeddah and the holy places one can go by boat,” his father said. “But did you hear Sidi Masrur say that he would go on all the way to Baghdad? To Baghdad, Bilali!” Ahmad Baba shook his head in wonder. “Now, that is a place I never thought I would live to see.”
Twenty-two days after its departure from Shinqiti, the caravan reached Fez. Most of the merchants and pilgrims stopped there to prepare for the task of continuing their journey along the northern edge of the Sahara, taking the desert route to Cairo, but a third of them formed a different group, bound for Rabat and the sea. Bilali and his father followed Sidi Masrur to the vicinity of the carpenters’ guildhall in Fez, where by tradition the caravan bound for Rabat assembled. There they joined leather merchants and others from Fez who wished to carry their goods eastward by sea. The carpenters’ guildhall was located at one end of a great bazaar teeming with people and merchandise. Bilali had never seen such an assemblage, not even in Timbo. What he would remember best about Fez was the smell of cedar chips mingling with the fragrant wares of perfume sellers and druggists. For the rest of his life, the sweet smell of cedar would make him glimpse his father’s face as it was in the market at Fez, alive with hope and excitement.
Less than two days’ journey beyond Fez brought their smaller caravan to Rabat. They skirted the old city and snaked down narrow streets until the sea opened up before them like the sunlit pages of a book. As he had promised, Sidi Masrur helped Ahmad Baba find passage on one of the sailing ships that bobbed in the harbor. When Bilali admired a caravel with a dashing air and two sails—one square-rigged and one triangular lateen—the book trader shook his head. “See the flag? French. And there is no way to tell if they have paid their tribute or not. You don’t want to board a Christian ship unless you wish for personal acquaintance with pirates.”
“Pirates?” Ahmad Baba said.
“Bandits of the sea,” said Sidi Masrur. “Arab pirates. They’ll board a Christian ship, empty all purses and pockets, and gather up the passengers to sell for slaves.”
“But they won’t attack a Muslim ship?”
Sidi Masrur smiled. “Not if they care for their souls as well as their purses.”
The boat he found for them—and then boarded himself—appeared to be waiting for something on the wharf. Bilali stood at the stern rail while his father went to settle their account with the captain. The cool breeze made him want to remove the turban his father had ceremoniously wound around his head this auspicious morning, the day they set sail for the holy places. Bilali watched a dozen or so of the people his father called the unfortunate ones looking anxious and restless on the wharf—the women veiled, the men wrapped in whatever they could make of their tattered piece of cloth. He wondered if they, too, would come aboard, and if so, where were they going—not to the holy places, he felt sure. A worldly friend in Timbo had told him that most of the male slaves sent north and east would be soldiers, and most of the women concubines. A familiar voice, suddenly at his elbow, said, “In years gone by, they would have been traded for Barbary horses.”
Bilali turned quickly. He took one step back from the stern rail as Sidi Masrur leaned forward over it, resting his elbows, the better to consider the milling group on the wharf. “The usual rate was fifteen slaves for one horse, although the trader might take fewer in exchange if some had special knowledge or ability. Someone like you, Bilali, with your talents, you might stand for five mere laborers. Perhaps ten.”
“But I am not a slave!” The boy meant to say this calmly, but his heart was pounding. Then he heard the rattle of the anchor chain and the deep collective voice of the oarsmen as they pulled together, turning the bow of the white-sailed lateener toward open water. From where he stood, Bilali could see most of the deck. The captain was just below them, calling up to someone about the position of the rudder. Ahmad Baba was nowhere in sight. He had been gone a long time now. “Where is my father?” Bilali said, and when Sidi Masrur only looked out at the wharf as if he hadn’t heard, a sudden weakness in Bilali’s knees made him grip the rail. The second time he asked, he could hear the tremor in his voice. “Where is he? What have you done to him?”
But Sidi Masrur said only, “Look! We are under way.”
From Rabat, the lateener sailed up the short Atlantic coast of Morocco, through the straits at the foot of Tariq’s Mountain, which the English called Gibraltar, and into the Mediterranean Sea. After the first day, Bilali stopped begging the book trader to tell him, at least, what had happened to his father. Had they killed him and thrown his body into the sea? Or had they merely put him off the boat and left without him? Sidi Masrur couldn’t say, nor could the captain, and the rest were not certain who this Ahmad Baba was. As they sailed from port to port across the northern coast of Africa, Bilali stopped speaking to any of them. He spent the hours watching the sailors at work. Sidi Masrur expected attempts at escape—not at sea, of course, but when they landed in Algiers and Tunis and Tripoli, and again in Alexandria, where Bilali spent their twenty days of quarantine chained to a timber in the private quarters of Sidi Masrur, just out of reach of the book trader’s throat. Sidi Masrur was especially watchful of his charge on the three-day journey by camel from Cairo to the Gulf of Suez and the Red Sea. Only then did Sidi Masrur breathe more easily. When, a few hours out, the captain of their Red Sea ship called, “Ahoy!” to an Arab pirates’ dhow, all the crew and the handful of passengers came running to the sides to see, including Bilali and his captor. Sidi Masrur did not expect the boy to do what he did then, just at the very moment when the pirates made their surprising musket shot “across the bow,” whether of greeting or warning, no one could say for sure. Everyone on board the lateener hit the deck, except for Bilali, who took the opportunity to vault himself over the rail. He barely missed the great wooden rudder as he somersaulted into the sea.
The brisk shock of hitting the water drove everything from the boy’s mind, including the fact that he couldn’t swim.
The pirates fished him, half drowned, out of the sea, and when the boy kept sobbing, “My father is dead,” the pirates thought they must have killed him. (It would not be the first time their musket shot across the bow found an unintended mark.) They wanted only for the other vessel to identify herself. Why did the captain fly no flag? (This was, in fact, never explained.) Why did he run the risk of being taken for a Christian ship? The boy sniffed and shivered and hardly understood a word as the pirate captain, thumping his chest with both pride and contrition, explained that he, Süleyman Reis, commanded a crew of Mohammedans. Their jihad against the infidels who sailed the Red Sea was meant not just to fill their purses (and the ship’s hold) with treasure, but to win them entrance to Paradise. Only God knew how much hard-earned baraka they had canceled out by killing one of the faithful—worse yet, one who was on his way to the holy places, who had not yet completed the hajj. Would that they had struck the poor man down on his way home instead—not that they meant to do it either way! Süleyman Reis assured Bilali. In reparation, they dried the boy off and warmed him up and fed him. They would have returned him to his people if they could have, the captain of the pirates said, but a brisk wind from the south—the last vestige of monsoons that had conveyed them from the Indian Ocean and through the Gate of Sorrows into the Red Sea—filled their triangular sail and swept them away from the other vessel. They promised to carry him wherever he willed to go, but when the boy said Baghdad, they were taken aback.
“It can be done,” Süleyman Reis said, “if God wills it.” He tucked his thumbs into his sash and considered. The pirate captain wore a pointed turban and a pair of tunics over loose pants and soft leather shoes like slippers, good for pacing the deck. The wide sash around his slightly bulging middle accommodated three long knives and a sword. More than once Bilali wondered how he managed not to stick himself when he sat down.
“If the wind was right,” Süleyman Reis continued, “we could carry you to Basrah, and there hire a small craft to go upriver.” He was standing amidships with the boy and looked up at his gently billowing lateen. “The wind will not be right for a few months yet.”
“Months!” said Bilali. He, too, looked up at the great triangular sail over his head. On this side of the mast, opposite the sail, at least two dozen lines of rope ran down from the spar like a lopsided spider’s web, crisscrossing here and there, with wooden blocks or pulleys in different spots on each line, as if they’d chosen where to perch themselves. The lateen on the other ship, the one he’d boarded with his father, was much more elegantly rigged than this one. Ahmad Baba had pointed out the beauty of it right before he went off in search of the captain, leaving his son at the rail to gaze down and ponder the mysteries of displacement as the two-hundred-ton lateener rolled gently on the waves in the harbor. Without warning, Bilali’s eyes filled with tears and his nose started running. He addressed both problems with his sleeve before he remarked, still looking up, “You don’t need so many ropes.”
“What do you mean?” asked Süleyman, cocking one eye upward again.
The boy paused, as if considering, and then he asked, “Have you ever heard of a knot called Toes of the Camel?”
Süleyman Reis had not.
They tested the new rigging by setting sail for Jeddah, where the pirate captain left four men to guard the ship with muskets. (In the harbor, as they rowed in to shore, Bilali kept a sharp eye out for the lateener.) Süleyman Reis hired camels for the rest of the crew to accompany the boy to Mecca.
It was near the end of the twelfth month of a year near the end of the twelfth century of Hijra. Almost twelve hundred years had passed since the Prophet fled across the desert. Many believed the end of time was at hand. Outside Mecca, where Bilali and the pirate crew camped in rented tents, pilgrim caravans filled the whole horizon. Bilali and the pirates purified themselves, casting aside their ordinary clothes (and knives and swords) and wrapping their bodies in the garb of ihram. They completed the hajj twice: once for his father and once for themselves. Two times seven times they circled the Ka’bah, where Abraham once stood. Seven times two times they hurried back and forth between the rock and the hard place, as Süleyman put it, remembering how poor Hagar searched for water in the desert. On the ninth day they rose very early, with a minimum of grumbling, and climbed Mount Arafat (twice). They cast stones at the devil and in the valley of Mina they sacrificed two sheep.
They returned by camel to Jeddah, where their ship lay at anchor, feeling exhausted and exonerated and so pure and light and generous of spirit that Süleyman Reis did not so much as draw his sword when Bilali spotted the evil Sidi Masrur pacing up and down the dock, as if waiting for a customer, a book tucked under his arm. Süleyman Reis was feeling so generous, in fact, that he took Bilali by the upper arm and handed him over to Sidi Masrur, saying, “Go with your uncle.”
“My what?”
“It’s time you returned to your studies in the House of Wisdom, nephew,” said the suddenly avuncular Sidi Masrur, taking Bilali’s other arm.
“He did ask that we deliver him to Baghdad in the end,” Süleyman Reis pointed out, as if in defense of a boy’s desire for a little adventure before settling down to the books. He let go of Bilali, now that the book trader had a good grip on him, and held out his hand. A little awkwardly, still holding the book under his arm, Sidi Masrur dropped a small, lumpy leather purse into the pirate’s palm. “You are a very clever boy,” Süleyman said to Bilali, tossing the purse into the air and catching it again with a most satisfying clink of coins. “If anyone should be studying the ways of science and the Banu Musa, it is you.”
“It was his father’s greatest wish,” Sidi Masrur said.
Bilali had planted his feet, prepared for a struggle to the death, if need be—what better time, after all, having just completed the hajj?—but when he saw what book was tucked under the book trader’s arm, all the fight emptied out of him, replaced by a surge of pure grief.
The book was the Qur’an, his father’s handwritten copy.
Aboard the lateener once again, Sidi Masrur had the boy bound hand and foot belowdecks until such time as the ship was well past the Gate of Sorrows, riding the seas again with no other vessel in sight. When Bilali was finally permitted to emerge from the darkness below—blindfolded to save his sight—he sat unmoving against the ship’s wales and practiced squinting until he found that he could open both eyes in the murky light behind the cloth without a stab of pain.
Bilali was still blindfolded when he jumped overboard a second time, Sidi Masrur shouting and cursing above him, unable to believe the boy’s poor judgment and his own ill luck. This time, there was no pirate dhow to save him. Indeed, Bilali had no wish to be saved, although he couldn’t help taking one more last breath every time the waves tossed him upward, until a miracle of God—the Compassionate, the Merciful—lifted him up on the highest of whitecaps and cast him upon a hidden and uncharted reef. When the boy staggered to his feet in the ankle-deep water washing over the reef, the ship’s crew and passengers saw him standing on the surface of the ocean. They praised Allah vociferously as they watched Bilali walk away across the water. Sidi Masrur demanded a party of rowers to take a dinghy in pursuit of his property, but the captain of the lateener was tired of the book trader’s demands, and an uncharted reef was far too treacherous to approach. After additional prayers of thanksgiving for the miracle they had witnessed, they sailed on.
As he walked, half blind, in a daze, across the Gulf of Aden, Bilali’s eyes stung from seawater and sunlight, the blindfold long gone the way of his turban. When he stopped and turned and could finally look behind him, his breath caught in his throat. The lateener was a toy ship retreating brilliantly across blue water that lapped the horizon all around. When he turned back to look ahead, far ahead, he saw a brown line between water and sky, land of some kind, perhaps at the end of the reef or perhaps impossibly far beyond it. He walked toward it, the water bathing his ankles, the sun assailing him from every direction, until he could walk no more.
When he awoke, he was curled up on a sandy beach in the shade of another miracle. This time it was a camel taking her ease like the Sphinx, as if the two of them had stopped to rest together. Bilali climbed aboard and wedged himself as best he could between the hump and her long neck, delighted to find there a leather bag provisioned with dates and a fat water bottle. She stopped at every camel well between the Gulf of Aden, where Bilali had stepped ashore, and the giant caravanserai on the outskirts of Basrah, a journey of eight hundred miles or more. Bilali replenished his provisions when he could, sometimes joining a caravan as it wended from well to well, but keeping mostly to himself. On the outskirts of Basrah, with regret and a rumbling stomach, Bilali traded his miracle camel for food, clothing, and a small amount of money, enough to purchase passage on one of the little round boats that paddled upstream to Baghdad.
Bilali found the once-great city in a state of some decline: sprawled between and around two sluggish rivers, dusty, hot, sleepy, except when the tunnel of a street opened into a market where buyers and sellers swarmed. At a stall in a fruit and flower market, Bilali learned that the House of Wisdom where the Banu Musa lived and worked had fallen when the Mongols crushed Baghdad five hundred years before. “They say the Tigris ran black with ink from all the books cast into the water,” a citrus vendor said. His neighbor, a seller of pomegranates, disagreed, claiming instead that “the river ran red with the blood of the scholars.” The second merchant also pointed out that there was still a certain quarter of the city wherein many scholars dwelled. “Perhaps you will find there what you seek.” With a few minutes’ labor fixing an unbalanced scale, Bilali purchased two pomegranates and detailed directions to the Street of Scholars.
It was a street like many others, barely wider than a man’s spread arms or the carefully balanced load on a water boy’s donkey, a tunnellike street with yellow-white buildings crowding over it, as if the arched windows and little stone balconies on one side of the street had secrets to whisper to the houses on the other. The boy walked up and down its length four times—from the mosque and minaret that closed it off at one end to the blank wall down at the other—without encountering another living soul. He knew from his days in Timbo that true scholars were a quiet bunch, spending their time bowed over books, but this street felt quiet as a tomb. He learned later that some of the narrow houses were, in fact, tombs, with their lifelong resident scholars now buried under the floors. Bilali was on his fourth trip down the street when he stopped suddenly to read the words painted in white on a blue tile next to a plain wooden door in the center of the block. BAYT AL-HIKMA, the sign said. The House of Wisdom.
Bilali folded his arms. He knew with the utmost certainty that the little sign had not been there on his previous pass down the street. And yet, having traveled three thousand miles by land and sea to catch a glimpse of the work of the Banu Musa, how could he leave without seeing what was inside?
He knocked and the door opened. A kindly-looking man who wore the turban of a scholar and whose beard was white although his eyes were youthful, greeted him, saying, “God is great.”
Bilali bowed respectfully.
Inside, he followed the scholar (there seemed to be only this one—Ibrahim ibn al-Kindi was his name) through one shadowy room into the next. They came to a chamber furnished with thick carpets and lined with shelves made from tightly woven palm branches on which leather-covered books were stacked, from the floor to the not-very-lofty ceiling. This was the library. The scholar al-Kindi gestured toward a book of large dimensions that lay open on a low table. “This is perhaps what you seek?”
Although he had never seen it before, Bilali recognized the book at once from his father’s descriptions of it. From the doorway, he could see a drawing on the right-hand page of the open book—a container of some kind, with a handle and spout. Black script surrounded the drawing like scalloped waves around an island, the waves spilling onto the left-hand page, promising movement and mystery (which are in themselves a kind of escape, al-Kindi would argue later). It was the Book of Ingenious Devices, the Kitab al-Hiyal. Young Bilali knew when he saw it that the world might come to an end for him here, in the so-called House of Wisdom, but he couldn’t keep his heart from beating faster—Here it is, Father, I am touching it, the book is in my hands—as he knelt to turn the page.
It didn’t take long for Bilali to wrest from Ibrahim ibn al-Kindi, that impoverished and duplicitious but kindly scholar, everything he knew about Sidi Masrur’s plans for him.
“He knew I would come here,” Bilali said.
“He knew you would, if you survived.”
“And you are in his employ?”
Al-Kindi bowed his head. They were sitting on a low stone wall in the unkempt garden at the center of the House of Wisdom. The old man removed his scholar’s turban, as if he were unworthy of it, and let his white hair fall over his face. “He offered me the Book on the Long, Curved Figure by al-Hasan,” the old scholar admitted. “Also, he fed me for a year.”
Such an investment would demand a large return. “How much can Sidi Masrur hope to get for me?” Bilali asked.
“He already has a buyer. You are a very valuable commodity, my boy.” Al-Kindi toyed with the folds of the turban in his lap. “In fact,” he said, “the sultan’s vizier has made a substantial payment in advance.”
“The sultan’s vizier?”
It seemed Bilali’s destiny lay in the service of the sultan at Topkapi, who took great interest in the Banu Musa and their ingenious devices. “Their fountains, especially,” al-Kindi said. “The sultan loves fountains.” Although a slave, Bilali would live a life of relative luxury in the Topkapi Palace, al-Kindi said. He would spend his days in study and invention, figuring things out, in short, doing what he loved best to do. “Does that sound so uninviting?” al-Kindi asked. “It is the equal of my own life, except for the luxury, which, as you can see all around you, I do not enjoy.”
“But I would be a slave,” Bilali said.
“You would.”
If it was easy for Bilali to get Ibrahim ibn al-Kindi to reveal the plans of Sidi Masrur—including the estimated time of the book trader’s return to Baghdad months hence—it was easier still to convince the old scholar of that which he most fervently wanted to believe: that Bilali had no wish to escape his “destiny.” A boy whose father was dead and whose home was thousands of miles away was in a very precarious position, Bilali admitted. Such a boy could do much worse than the Topkapi Palace. That understood, it seemed sensible to save a little money for the market by letting one of the guards go, and entirely reasonable to keep the other one on only at night, more to safeguard the library than to prevent an escape. The boy appeared willing to bide his time in the House of Wisdom, eating well, and learning what he could from al-Kindi, who was a genuine scholar of the Banu Musa with many stories to tell. Bilali spent every moment he could hunched over the fragile pages of the Kitab al-Hiyal. (The manuscript in al-Kindi’s possession was over three hundred years old. “Much newer than the original!” he said.) Bilali memorized the difficult Arabic line by line, he studied every curve and angle in each device, learning them so well that at night, by moon or even only starlight, he could reproduce the drawings and the text from memory on paper he stole from al-Kindi’s hidden cache during the day. The boy was struck, in the process, by how playful the sons of Musa were, how like magicians or tricksters, so many of their devices serving no more purpose than to trick or please the eye, unless it was to demonstrate their gift for bringing into actuality the potential power of liquid and volume and air.
With the dirhams they saved by dismissing the guards, al-Kindi encouraged the boy to purchase the necessary materials and make one or two of the devices. “For the pleasure of it,” al-Kindi said, hinting, “A fountain would be nice.”
Bilali did not have the time for such niceties, for he was not so resigned to his fate as he pretended to be. When he had copied all one hundred ingenious devices—that is to say, when he had a complete Kitab al-Hiyal, its loose leaves slipped inside a leather envelope he’d fashioned—then he would run away from the House of Wisdom, regretting that he had to leave al-Kindi without saying good-bye. He would find a caravan to join, one moving to the west, and he would make himself indispensable to it, he would invent and repair and improvise his way home. How surprised and (he hoped) pleased his mother would be to see him. And his grandfather.
That, at any rate, was his secret plan, and he would, in fact, accomplish most of it. He would join a westward-wending caravan, and he would manage to hide his loose-leaf Kitab al-Hiyal from the bandits who raided the caravan as it crossed the Hijaz, and later, from the slave traders to whom the bandits sold him, utterly unaware of the price they could have asked. Bilali would keep the Kitab out of sight for many weeks among the unfortunate ones, clutching it awkwardly under his tunic, burying it in the sand beneath his feet at night. When it was finally discovered at the market in Alexandria, where opportunities to hide something on one’s person were limited indeed, he would convince the auctioneer to convince the British planter who purchased Bilali to buy the Kitab as well. (After their long journey in hiding, the pages looked almost as ancient as Bilali claimed them to be.) On a vast plantation in the Bahamas, Bilali would make himself invaluable to the British planter, and years later, when he left the Bahamas with wives and daughters and a new owner, bound for an island off the unknown coast of Georgia, the Book of Ingenious Devices would go with them.
In the meantime, as a boy in the House of Wisdom, Bilali resolved to learn as much as he could from the old scholar, who appeared eager to teach him, even though Bilali was at times, as he himself knew, a trying student. When al-Kindi revealed one day that al-Hasan, the youngest of the Banu Musa, had been captured by the Caliph Amin during the siege of Baghdad, Bilali interrupted to protest, “I thought the Caliph was a patron of the Banu Musa.”
“Not this Caliph,” al-Kindi said. It was during the time when the sons of the most renowned and recently deceased Harun al-Rashid were at war, brother against brother, al-Kindi explained. Amin was the elder son, but everyone knew that his half-brother Ma’mun, the son of a Persian slave girl, was his father’s favorite. The Banu Musa were in the camp of Ma’mun, whose troops besieged the city. “Once captured by Amin, our friend al-Hasan would have spent his life in servitude,” al-Kindi said, “had he not escaped. The Caliph Amin felt a great fondness for handsome boys, you see, and the youngest of the Banu Musa was at that time a handsome boy.”
“He escaped, you say?” Bilali sat up straighter on the low wall in the garden, right next to the place where a fountain would have been nice.
“It’s quite a story,” said al-Kindi. “When Caliph Amin sent his vizier to make the new captive an offer he could not refuse—not if he wished to keep his head—what do you think al-Hasan did?”
“Did he run away?”
“Impossible. Armed guards on every side.”
“Did he draw out a hidden sword and slay the vizier and the armed guards?”
“Obviously impossible.”
“Did he accept the offer of the Caliph?”
“Of course. Now we are getting somewhere, Bilali. And then?”
“He betrayed his brothers and his father and became the consort of Amin?”
“Of course not.” The expression on Ibrahim ibn al-Kindi’s face suggested sudden doubts about Sidi Masrur’s judgment in the matter of young Bilali’s brilliance. “Think again.”
But the book trader was not wrong about young Bilali, who knew very well that clever al-Hasan, youngest of the Banu Musa, would deceive the weak-minded Caliph in some way. It was almost too easy, and the deception was distasteful to Bilali. Did a person of intelligence always have to sacrifice integrity in order to make use of his gifts?
“Perhaps,” said Bilali, “al-Hasan devises some clever trick or…object?”
“Of course!” cried al-Kindi. “An ingenious object to deceive the foolish Amin! We are talking about the Banu Musa, are we not? Al-Hasan turns to his brothers Muhammad and Ahmad for help, sending a message to Ma’mun’s camp in the hollow hilt of a sword.” Al-Kindi leaned forward. “Don’t you want to know what kind of ingenious device they devised to save al-Hasan from the Caliph Amin?”
“Yes, sir, I do,” Bilali admitted, whereupon al-Kindi told the tale, since lost to history, of
The Caliph and the Magic Pitcher
In the second century of the Hijra—the year 762, by the Christian reckoning of our time—the Abbasid Caliph Abu Ja’far al-Mansur drew with a stick on the ground beside the Tigris a great circle one mile wide, enclosing a dusty village. The line the Caliph drew on the ground was covered with bales of cotton—hundreds of bales, or perhaps thousands—all soaked in naphtha and set afire. When the flames died, a charred outline remained on the ground, marking the shape of the new capital. Caliph al-Mansur placed his Palace of the Golden Gate at the center of the Round City, surrounded by a wall of immense thickness. Three horsemen could ride abreast along the top of this wall. Four great metal gates—so massive that a company of men was required to open or close each one—permitted entrance to the inner city. Date palm trees brought from Basrah were planted everywhere, until the new city had more palms than Basrah, and they yielded plentiful fruit. Watered by canals in use since Babylonian times, gardens and orchards and fields spread out around the new city, gardens and fields that would flourish for another five hundred years, until invading Mongols destroyed the ancient canals and returned the land to the desert. Caliph al-Mansur called his new capital Madinat al-Salam. The City of Peace.
The locals called it Baghdad.
Even before al-Mansur’s son Mahdi succeeded his father as commander of the faithful, Baghdad had outgrown the Round City. Al-Mansur soon built himself a pleasure palace on the Tigris outside the Khurasan Gate. He called it Khuld, or Paradise Castle, and built another for his son on the opposite bank. Mosques and houses grew around each new palace, inhabitants flocked to the riverbanks, markets filled new suburbs. Already one whole bazaar was devoted to the sale of Chinese silks, another to brass and copper wares, another to spices, aloes, and sandalwood. One market offered teak for shipbuilding, another jewels and the new porcelain from China. In others food was sold: fruits, meats, grains, and prepared delicacies for every taste. Paper, linen, cotton, and rice from Egypt, perfumes and produce from Persia, pearls and weapons from Arabia, all were bought and sold in Baghdad, bazaar par excellence of the Middle East, heart of the Islamic empire, a new kind of Eden sprung up near the site of the old.
Under the rule of Mahdi’s son, the renowned Harun al-Rashid, Baghdad enjoyed a golden age of music, literature, art, and luxury—an age made famous, like Harun himself, by tales from The Arabian Nights. Though quick to laugh and prone to late-night adventures, Harun al-Rashid was at the same time a fearless soldier and prudent administrator, particularly when he followed the advice of Ja’far the Barmecide, the Caliph’s vizier and boon companion, famous in his own right for getting Harun out of tight spots and awkward episodes. The empire expanded in size and influence under the rule of Harun al-Rashid. Visitors from East and West left Baghdad awed by the splendor of his court. (The envoy of Charlemagne returned to a Europe still blinking away the Dark Ages with gifts that included two elephants and a most ingenious water clock, in which miniature knights marked the hour by opening tiny doors.) But the Caliph Harun could be cruel and jealous as well. When his friend the vizier displeased Harun by falling in love with the Caliph’s sister (and, it must be added, by building a palace across the river that rivaled the Caliph’s in splendor), neither friendship nor privilege could save Ja’far the Barmecide. Dismembered and displayed on the bridge across the Tigris like any condemned man, he wore the same terrible look of disbelief on his skewered head.
The two sides of Harun al-Rashid’s nature—the stern and the frivolous (as well as the jealous and fickle)—appeared to be divided between his two sons: soldierly Ma’mun, who fought beside his father in rebellious Khurasan, and pleasure-loving Amin, Harun’s elder son, who succeeded his father as Caliph in Baghdad when Harun fell ill and died.
Everyone knew that Amin was a man who enjoyed games and singing more than government or war. It was said that his mother Zubaida, favorite wife and now widow of Harun al-Rashid, had to interest her son in the fairer sex by dressing young girls as page boys and sending them in to join Amin’s revelers. They were likely to find the new Caliph riding a wooden hobbyhorse borne by slaves about the hall while nervous guests sang and slave girls danced around him. When his half-brother Ma’mun refused to send revenues from the provinces to support such revels, Amin dispatched an army of forty thousand men to encourage his brother’s obedience to himself the Caliph. Amin’s army was routed by a force one-tenth its size under the command of Ma’mun’s fierce ally, Tahir the Ambidextrous, and seeing this, the surviving troops hailed Ma’mun as Caliph instead and set out to march against Baghdad in turn.
It was late in the ensuing two-year siege of Baghdad, while Amin still ruled as Caliph, that the youngest of the sons of Musa resolved to visit a friend in the city. The friend had made a discovery while distilling petroleum. Instead of the usual thick and odorous lamp oil, al-Hasan’s friend al-Razi had produced a thin, clear liquid that burned without smoke. (It is like water set afire! said the message al-Razi sent to Ma’mun’s camp concealed in the folds of a camel driver’s turban.) To avoid interference from the defenders of the city and also from his brothers, who advised against a visit to Baghdad while Baghdad was under siege, al-Hasan and a most trustworthy slave named Bab Sabu had secured the use of a kellek—a small raft made of inflated goatskins following an ancient Babylonian design—in which they floated noiselessly downriver under cover of darkness. In hopes of escaping capture, Bab Sabu took the precaution of landing two water gates away from the home of al-Razi, lately the inventor of kerosene and long a friend of the Banu Musa.
It was a precaution taken in vain.
Al-Hasan wished most heartily that he had listened to his brothers now that the severed head of Bab Sabu stared at him in startled agony from the bottom of the boat. Had Bab Sabu been a more important, if equally unfortunate, personage—like Ja’far the Barmecide, to take an example from history, or like the Caliph himself in days yet to come—his head and perhaps the rest of him might have been displayed on a bridge over the Tigris until it shriveled and dried like a bundle of dates in the sun. Because he was merely a slave, the head of Bab Sabu soon followed his body, still twitching, into the river. Al-Hasan was stuffed into a wooden trunk along with the goatskins, which the henchmen took care to deflate, and the trunk was carried off to the palace of the Golden Gate in the heart of the Round City. What with the horror of the beheading, the press of soggy goatskins, and the lack of air in the trunk, the youngest of the Banu Musa passed out cold before he got there.
A dream of flying woke him. He felt himself lifted into the air. When he dared to open his eyes, he saw a distant white ceiling and tall narrow windows, like obelisks of pure blue sky, casting bars of sunlight on the opposite wall. So it was morning—or maybe afternoon—and he was flat on his back on a broad taut sheet of silk caught up along its edges by six tall and burly fellows. They lifted him effortlessly in the cradle of silk and then lowered him gently into a cool bath of perfumed water. He was naked, he noticed.
“My tunic!” he cried.
In the corner of the room, two unveiled girls in colorful silks looked up sharply from a smoking brazier. One of them was using a poker to push the last strips of linen from al-Hasan’s tunic—stained with the blood of Bab Sabu—onto the burning coals.
Seeing them, al-Hasan recognized two unfortunate facts in the same instant: First, it was far too late to retrieve the folded paper from the pocket sewn inside his tunic by the hand of Bab Sabu. (He could only pray to God, the Merciful, the Compassionate, that his brother Ahmad had made another copy of its contents.) Second, the presence of these lovely unveiled girls—and there were more, he saw now, perhaps a dozen of them, arranging fruit on a large platter laid out on a spread of Persian carpets, pouring water into the tiled pool, standing by with thick towels and a gold-trimmed robe—could mean only one of two things. Either the Caliph was planning to give all these women to al-Hasan—which did not seem likely, he had to admit—or he was about to forfeit his own (largely untried) manhood and join the ranks of these eunuchs, the only males outside the Caliph’s family who were permitted to look upon the harem unveiled. (Impending death was a third possibility, but why would they go to all this trouble to prepare him thus for that?) There were guards ouside the room, flanking the arched doorway. He could see the left shoulder of one and the right of the other. He could not help but glance downward. Under the water, he was all there.
It did not bode well, he thought, when an opulently dressed young woman, bejeweled in every possible way and draped in strings of pearls, entered the room and clapped her hands. Everyone sprang into action. The brazier was snuffed out, he was helped from the fragrant bath, two girls commenced to dry him with thick cotton towels (this activity started to have its effect, even as frightened as he was), and another (not quite hiding her smile) presented him with a gold-trimmed robe of honor. Anxious to be covered, he held out his arms and she slipped it over his head. The golden hem brushed the bare tops of his feet, as if he had been measured for it. Then the well-dressed young woman clapped her hands again and everyone else disappeared except for one of the eunuchs, a black giant of a man.
“You must be hungry,” the girl said. It was her voice, more than her unveiled face, that told him she was no older than he was, despite the splendor of her dress. She gestured to the platter on the carpet at his feet, which contained a selection of Shami apples and quinces and pears, as well as an orange, two limes, and a pomegranate. He was suddenly famished. “Please sit,” she said, and when he did, she sat facing him, crossed-legged, the platter between them. “The pears are especially delicious.” She smiled. “Like drinking from a pear-shaped cup.”
As he took the first bite, he glanced over his shoulder at the brazier that held the smoking ruins of his tunic.
“Is this what you are looking for?” the girl said, holding up the folded piece of paper.
Pear juice ran unheeded down al-Hasan’s chin. He swallowed. A chunk of pear he had neglected to chew slid painfully down his throat.
The girl handed the paper to him. He unfolded it with his less sticky hand, comforted to see his brother’s drawing, every pipe and plate and inconspicuous hole so neatly labeled in accordance with the instructions Ahmad had written out on the other side. There was nothing incriminating about the diagram, he thought, or even—he turned it over—the directions.
“Abdul Dalama has examined this paper”—she nodded toward the eunuch and he nodded back—“and he tells me it says the object pictured has the power to distinguish infidels from believers. Is this correct?”
“No,” said al-Hasan. His voice was rusty. The last time he had spoken, it was to Bab Sabu. (“Hurry up!” he might have said, or, “Watch where you put that paddle.”) From the corner of his eye, he saw Abdul Dalama’s huge shoulders bristle. He hastened to clear his throat. “It only appears that the pitcher has this power.”
They both looked at him with exactly the same degree of menace and doubt, the beautiful reclining girl and the towering slave.
“It’s a trick,” he said. “An ingenious device to fool the eye.”
“Why did you bring it to Baghdad hidden in your tunic?”
“I wanted to show it to my friend.” He almost said al-Razi’s name but stopped in time. To calm himself, he breathed in long draughts of musk and ambergris still rising from the bath and from his own skin.
“But why did you hide it, this”—she lifted the paper—“‘magic pitcher’?”
“Because it is a trick,” he said. “If everyone knew how it worked, then it would be good for nothing.”
The girl and the eunuch continued to give him their steady, opaque look.
“If I had one to show you, then you would see.”
That sent a glance darting between them.
“How long would it take you to make such a thing?” the girl asked him.
“That depends,” he said. “If I had the proper tools and the materials—”
“How long?”
“Two days?” It was only a guess. His brother Ahmad was the maker of ingenious devices. Al-Hasan was the mathematician, the geometry man, the great deducer, mostly to be found with his nose in the latest translation of Euclid. “Perhaps three days.”
“Perhaps,” the girl said. She leaned forward and selected a grape from the platter of fruit. “Perhaps you would like to know what the Caliph has in mind for you, al-Hasan bin Musa bin Shakir,” she said. “Or perhaps”—she glanced at the imposing Abdul Dalama—“you already know.”
Al-Hasan avoided glancing at the imposing Abdul. “I have heard that the Caliph takes pleasure in…boys…I mean, youths who are not—”
“The Caliph takes his pleasures with whomsoever he pleases.” She popped the grape into her mouth. “The only distinction he makes is in what happens when those pleasures are denied him. If I refused him, for example, or displeased him in some way, he would have me roundly beaten. Only if he felt particularly bored or frustrated would he take more serious measures, perhaps calling upon Mustafa al-Janna for a demonstration of swordsmanship. Wait—you’ve never heard of Mustafa? He is famous! A swordsman so strong and so swift he can whisk off a prisoner’s four limbs and the head, all before the body hits the ground. I’ve only seen it twice. It is very impressive—messy, of course, but impressive. Incredible, really. Is it not, Abdul?”
“It takes practice, my lady,” the eunuch said impassively.
“Of course it does—Oh! But you grow pale needlessly, al-Hasan. The Caliph Amin would never have Mustafa practice on a handsome boy like yourself. What have you? Fourteen years? Fifteen?”
“Seventeen,” whispered al-Hasan. It was a lie.
“In truth? You look younger. I advise you to be younger. Now, if you refuse the Caliph, he will merely remove your testicles. Well, he will have them removed—perhaps by Mustafa! What do you think, Abdul?”
“There is virtue in the swiftness of the blade, my lady.”
Al-Hasan struggled to his feet. The room reeled as he staggered to a window and looked down. The drop to the ground was just far enough to mean certain death. The girl’s voice seemed to come from afar.
“If you feel you might vomit,” she was saying, “may I recommend the brazier rather than the window?”
He turned around. “What can be done?” he cried. “Is there no escape?”
She said, reaching for another grape, “That depends.”
“On what?”
“On you.”
The plan of action he devised required that messages be sent to his brothers Ahmad and Muhammad, the elder two of the Banu Musa, and to their friend al-Razi, inventor of kerosene. (To al-Hasan’s surprise, Abdul the eunuch hid these messages in the split soles of his sandals. It seemed that the well-dressed girl and her servant had secrets of their own to keep from the Caliph.) Al-Razi dwelled in the Street of Scholars in the newest quarter of Baghdad. Al-Hasan’s two brothers were camped with their lord Ma’mun’s allies in the palace on the opposite bank from that of the Caliph Amin. All three of the Banu Musa had been summoned by Ma’mun a few weeks earlier to take careful measurements and verify predictions regarding the Tigris at flood stage. Ma’mun did not wish to see his troops inundated by spring floods before he seized the city.
“Do not mention my name,” the girl told al-Hasan as he wrote out his messages on bits of parchment in the tiniest possible script.
“How can I mention it when you have never told me what it is?”
“How wise of me,” she said, but when she and the eunuch Abdul Dalama returned the next day, she told him she was called Gamal’Abayad.
“White She-Camel?”
“A person as clever as yourself surely knows that gamal also means ‘beautiful woman.’”
“To whom? A camel driver?”
The towering Abdul Dalama placed a large wooden trunk on the floor. “Take care,” he whispered. “Her father was a camel driver.” He drew his finger across his throat.
They had come to deliver the materials Al-Hasan needed to make the magic pitcher. (A return message from his brothers had arrived in a water jar before dawn.) Al-Hasan thought the trunk at his feet looked a lot like the one into which he had been stuffed upon his capture at the river. It smelled of fish and goats. His heart sank as he rummaged through the box. It would be difficult enough to construct the device from sheets of newly pounded metal. The assortment of brass pots and ewers and other metal containers in the box meant additional hours of cutting and disassembly before the real work could begin. And what had he told her? Two days? Three? “Where is the tool for soldering? I must have one! Every seam must be so tightly sealed that air cannot—”
She stooped to pull something from the box. “Is this what you seek?”
He took what she offered, hiding his surprise. She lifted a squat metal pitcher from the box, turned it appraisingly, replaced it, and chose another. “A woman may know more than you think, al-Hasan,” she said. “Your lord Ma’mun’s Persian mother was very young when she gave birth to him. You already know, perhaps, that she was not the Caliph’s first wife? And that the first wife cast her out immediately after Ma’mun’s birth, even before the child was weaned? Think of it! The mother of Ma’mun—he who will soon, very soon, be Caliph and Commander of the Faithful on earth—was sold to a camel driver! And the camel driver sold her years later to a metalsmith in Isfahan, shortly after she gave birth to me. The camel driver was hoping for a male child, you see. The metalsmith cared more about the length and strength of my fingers than what was between my legs.”
The youngest of the Banu Musa was not accustomed to women speaking to him so frankly. He cleared his throat. “Then you are Ma’mun’s half-sister! Does he know of this?”
“Ma’mun has many, many half-sisters.” She examined a battered brass ewer the size of a donkey’s head—the very one they would soon transform, adding a long spout, a hollow handle, and numerous compartments and passageways within. “But only one of them is a metalsmith.”
The work on the pitcher had barely begun when the Caliph Amin sent word, commanding al-Hasan’s presence at the evening’s revelry under the dome in the Palace of the Golden Gate. Appropriate clothing, oils, perfumes, and a persuasive escort of eunuchs would be delivered to him.
The White She-Camel (as he could not but think of her) scowled when he shared the distressing news. “We knew it was coming,” she said.
“How can I get out of it?” al-Hasan asked her.
“You cannot, I’m afraid.”
“But…if he desires—”
“What other choice is there, al-Hasan? We have to bide our time until the pitcher is ready.” Taking up the soldering iron, she added, “I know the prospect does not please you, but from my own experience, I can tell you this: it is not a fate worse than death.”
It was a fate that al-Hasan was determined to avoid.
Whether alone or with the surreptitious help of Gamal ’Abayad, he labored without cease in the day, and at night he attended such revels as were expected of him, somehow remaining out of sight until the Caliph had consumed too much wine to remember his own name, much less the existence of his prisoner, the youngest of the Banu Musa. The revels grew stranger each night. The Caliph Amin came and went at odd times, missing the meat course on the first night and delaying the dessert of tiny layered almond cakes that looked quite delectable but tasted like paper, which was what, in fact, they were. (“Who eats cakes made of paper?” al-Hasan asked Gamal’Abayad the next day, and she said, “Residents of a city two years besieged.”) On the third night, supper was lacking entirely, as if it had been forgotten, much to the disappointment of al-Hasan and many of the other guests. As for the Caliph, he rode and rode his wooden horse around the candlelit courtyard at the head of a phalanx of his best officers, each of them mounted on the back of a soldier outfitted with bit and bridle and broom-straw tail. There were no horses left in Baghdad, Abdul Dalama told al-Hasan, every last one slaughtered and eaten. “Last night’s meat course?” al-Hasan whispered as the Caliph rode past. Abdul Dalama, who was being so kind as to shield the youngest of the Banu Musa from the Caliph’s gaze, remarked over his massive shoulder that the population of cats in the city appeared to be dwindling.
But it was the following afternoon when the fate that was not worse than death drew closest to al-Hasan. He had finished rereading his brother Ahmad’s missive regarding the relatively safe and effective operation of the magic pitcher (having long since eaten the pomegranate peel in which the message was hidden), and he was practicing the smooth and—it was to be hoped—imperceptible shifting of his thumb from one small hole on the handle to another, testing the pitcher by pouring either water or nothing at all into a pair of drinking cups placed side by side on the window’s stone sill, when he heard a commotion outside the door. A slave named Yuqub who had been delivered to him just this morning as personal servant, bodyguard, and jailer all in one turned around at his post to assess the newcomers and immediately fell to the floor. Amin himself came through the door, stepped over the flattened Yuqub, and looked around the room. Strips and pieces of metal cut from various utensils curled on the stone sills of the windows and, hazardously, on the floor. The brazier smoked beside a large stone jar of cold water. Tools and bits of wood lay strewn about.
Al-Hasan’s heart rose into his throat. His first thought was, Here it comes. Having never seen the Commander of the Faithful at quite such close range before, he discovered that the Caliph, when standing on his own two feet, was an ordinary-looking man. Tall, yes, but bald at the temples and perhaps paler than average, with a hooked nose and small eyes that were half closed at the moment, a result of tipping his head back to regard al-Hasan appraisingly, his arms folded across his muscular chest.
“You have been avoiding the Commander of the Faithful, O youngest son of Musa.”
Not sure if he would get in more trouble by admitting this was true or by telling the Caliph he was wrong, al-Hasan said nothing. He noticed that the Caliph’s entourage of nabobs and amirs, gathered in the doorway behind him, appeared to be signaling to al-Hasan with increasing urgency. They were pointing to the floor. Al-Hasan looked down at his bare feet on the black and white marble tiles—and then he understood.
“Oh, get up, get up,” the Caliph said. “And take off your robe.”
Al-Hasan reminded himself: It is not a fate worse than death. He hung his robe over the brazier.
“Now your tunic.”
“To hear is to—”
“Just do it, my boy.”
Al-Hasan thanked God the Merciful, the Compassionate, that he had wrapped his loins in linen this morning, something he did not do every day. In the doorway, the Caliph’s entourage watched him now with expressions of perfect blankness. Yuqub had not lifted his face from the floor.
“And now, perhaps…the turban!”
So saying, the Caliph plucked from al-Hasan’s sweaty neck the loose end of his rather meager and lopsided turban, which, together with the linen down below, was all that kept the youngest of the Banu Musa from a state of complete nakedness. Al-Hasan closed his eyes. The Caliph skimmed his finger across the boy’s chest, just below the collarbone, causing him to break out in goose bumps, whereupon the Caliph laughed and said, “How we love these handsome Persians.”
Al-Hasan hunched his shoulders and held his breath and waited for whatever was coming next. To his great surprise—and greater relief—the Caliph abruptly stopped tickling his chest and said, in a different tone, “Well, what have we here?”
Al-Hasan opened his eyes. The Caliph was at the window, holding the modified pitcher up to the late afternoon light. It looked sadly improvised, al-Hasan thought, every dimple and seam visible.
“It is my gift for you, Commander of the Faithful,” al-Hasan said. This was a little stratagem, in case the Caliph discovered the pitcher before they could spring it on him in public. In a burst of inspiration al-Hasan added, “And it is also the reason for my seclusion. I have only just completed it.”
At least the Caliph Amin didn’t laugh. Al-Hasan stumbled on.
“I know you have many pitchers, Commander of the Faithful, and all are more beautiful than this one, I am sure, but this one…” He darted a look at the doorway. “This one is a magic pitcher.”
“Magic?” said Amin. He tipped the pitcher, as if to pour. “In what way magic?”
Al-Hasan lowered his voice. “If we can be alone for a moment, sire”—he prayed this was not a mistake—“I can explain.”
Amin’s eyes lit up in surprise and anticipation. He waved at his entourage and they disappeared through the doorway, Yuqub following on his hands and knees. When al-Hasan intimated that the device could be used to expose unbelievers into whose cup the pitcher would permit no liquid to flow, the Caliph was beside himself at the prospect.
“Show me,” he said, “show me!”
Al-Hasan dipped a carafe into the water jar and poured its contents slowly and carefully into the mouth of the pitcher. He handed the Caliph a cup—“If you will, my lord.” The Caliph gripped the cup with both hands, eagerly.
Al-Hasan tipped the pitcher carefully.
No water issued forth.
Al-Hasan tipped the pitcher farther, and then a little farther, with the same result.
Amin’s face darkened. Fury rushed across his features, preceded by something else. Was it fear? The pitcher wobbled in al-Hasan’s hand. Although terror threatened to overcome him at any moment, he held the Caliph’s eyes for another second, and another, and while they were both pinned in each other’s gaze, the boy shifted his thumb imperceptibly, uncovering a small hole in the hollow handle of the pitcher. Water trickled forth.
The darkness drained from the Caliph’s face, but when the cup was full, he flung the water out the window with one disdainful thrust.
“I must say that your magic pitcher doesn’t work particularly well.”
Al-Hasan apologized. “I’m afraid I need more practice.” It would also help, he thought, if he could put his clothes back on, but he didn’t say this, adding instead, “It is a trick, you see.”
Amin’s face darkened again. “I do not care for tricks.”
Al-Hasan took a deep breath. “If I may be bold, my lord, I think you will enjoy this one.”
He was right. As the youngest of the Banu Musa explained how the pitcher worked—how covering the little hole kept air from entering the pitcher, which, in turn, prevented the water from pouring out—the Caliph’s expression changed. By the end of al-Hasan’s second demonstration, using the cups on the stone sill of the window, the Caliph was bouncing on his toes.
“Oh, my dear boy,” he said. “Think of the possibilities. How absolutely ingenious.”
When Amin called for the door to be opened, the gleeful satisfaction in his voice and on his face left everyone in the Caliph’s entourage quite certain of what had just transpired between the Commander of the Faithful and the youngest of the Banu Musa.
On the terrace of the Khuld that night, a thousand and one candles turned darkness into day.
The family and guests of the Caliph were a little more anxious than usual, being in plain sight of Ma’mun’s troops on the other side of the river, but the Caliph had resolved to display his valuable (and cooperative) prisoner in the sight of his foes. The banquet laid out on platters of silver and gold included roast mutton and quail and the great fish called biz—each fish a platterful—together with every kind of fruit and sweet cake. Ma’mun’s troops could not discern from the other side of the river that all these delicacies were made of clay and tar. Although the wine was merely water, the Caliph announced that it had been obtained by his father, the renowned Harun al-Rashid, from a band of holy kalandars who were themselves, as monks, forbidden to taste their own wares. It would be served from a special pitcher—here Amin raised his voice to carry across the river—by their honored guest, the youngest of the Banu Musa, Al-Hasan bin Musa bin Shakir.
The youngest of the Banu Musa rose to his feet, breathed deeply to still the shaking of his knees, and lifted the pitcher above his head for all to see. He avoided looking at Gamal’Abayad, who was seated on a Persian carpet at the feet of the Caliph, her hand resting lightly on the base of an iron lampstand that was as tall as a shepherd’s crook. An oil lamp shaped like a gravy boat hung from the lampstand on a golden chain, illuminating the eager face of the Caliph as he explained the special nature of the magic pitcher. The Caliph’s voice rose for emphasis on certain words, such as unbeliever and exposed.
All around the terrace, goblets trembled and faces paled. The Caliph Amin was too busy enjoying the terrified expressions of his guests to notice that Gamal’Abayad had curled her fingers around the iron pole of the lampstand. Above her veil, the girl’s eyes were bright.
Then the Caliph stood and raised his golden cup. He would be served first.
On the other side of the Tigris, in the camp of Ma’mun, slaves and soldiers stood ready with long poles and little round boats by the water gate. Al-Hasan’s brothers—the elder two of the Banu Musa—each gripped the other’s arm, their eyes fixed on the candlelit terrace across the river. No one saw the veiled girl shift slightly on her Persian carpet. The lampstand leaned now toward the empty cup in the hands of the Caliph, as if to take a look inside, and as the brightly burning lamp swung forward on its chain, al-Hasan moved his thumb from the hole in the handle of the pitcher and poured forth not wine, not water, but a colorless serving of kerosene. Burning lamp met flammable liquid. From the other side of the river, the brothers of al-Hasan saw a flaming stream that lit the air above the Caliph’s cup. And then the pitcher fell, spilling flames.
The fiery hem of al-Hasan’s magnificent robe of honor made him run all the faster to the edge of the terrace, where he hurled himself into the river, the White She-Camel right behind him. In the water, the long robe gave him trouble, though, entangling his legs. He coughed and struggled and spit and coughed and floundered, but the opposite bank with its little round boats seemed no closer. He had no idea what had become of Gamal’Abayad. Al-Hasan went under. It is said that the Tigris ran deeper in those times. He struggled to the surface once again, then sank again, and then time stretched out calmly before him the way we’ve heard it does, giving him a chance to rue the bitterness of ending thus, if end this was, before he had read half the books of Euclid or written a single one of his own. And that’s where the story almost ended—right before the rescue of Gamal’Abayad and al-Hasan—because that’s when Theo Boykin woke up.
You forgot about him, didn’t you? You, and the Garnerer of graveyards.
My sister May barely had time to deposit Gamal and al-Hasan, gasping and sputtering, on the banks of the Tigris, before we heard a big commotion heading our way across the schoolyard. It was Etta George come running, waving her arms over her head and pulling at her hair, my own mother right behind her, the both of them whooping and laughing, almost in hysterics, shrieking, “He’s awake! He woke up! Theo woke up!”
Pretty near everybody jumped up and took off for the Boykins’ house, except for me and May, who was worn out with storytelling.
“Well, praise Jesus,” May said wearily. “I just about knew he’d come around, didn’t you?” She was still sitting in Miss Spivey’s chair, her arms wrapped around her big round belly as if she had to hold on to keep it from rolling off her lap. From where I sat, the window was behind May, the pale blue sky tinged with pink. She sat up straight.
“May?” I said. “Is it the baby?”
“Baby’s fine,” she said. “Kickin’ me.”
I came and sat across from her, and then I asked what everybody was going to be asking once they had time to think about what they’d heard. “May,” I said, “how did you know all those things to tell?”
She shrugged. “Miss Spivey told me some.”
“But there was things in that story—I don’t see how—”
“Everything was laid out for me in my mind, Gladys. All I had to do was say it out loud.”
“That sure enough sounds strange, May.”
“It sure enough was.”
We heard an automobile coming up the road, getting closer and louder. I looked out and saw Daddy had come back to get us. Leaf shadows were trembling in patches of light against the wall of the schoolroom. May turned around in her chair to look out the window at the first bolt of sun coming through the trees. “My goodness,” she said. “We set up all night.”
After the fact, all kinds of theories would be put forth to explain May’s feat of storytelling in the schoolhouse that night. (It was, as my brother Force said, a situation lacking in verisimilitude.) Mrs. Reverend Stokes saw significance in the fact that May, like Shahrazad, was in a family way. Plenty of folks believed that babies waited in the mind of God before they came out into the world, and as Mrs. Stokes said, He sure enough knew the whole story. That’s when I found out that Mrs. Reverend Stokes had carried and lost five babies in her life, and every time (she told my momma) the baby had warned her in a dream that it was just too sweet up there in heaven for him or her to give it up and get born. Mrs. Stokes didn’t need to hear a thing about verisimilitude. She knew this for a fact: “The whole time May was talking, her baby was whispering directly in her ear.”