Chapter 6 #2
Jamal hastily put down the scroll. “Never mind.” He crossed the courtyard to embrace us, kissing my cheeks. “I pray your trip was smooth?”
“A few surprises, but such is the life.” I spied shadows beneath his eyes, a thinness in his face and clucked my tongue in disapproval. “You are working too hard and eating too little.” Casting a suspicious look at his uncle, my voice sharpened. “Is that your doing?”
Abu Gharib nervously pulled his stack of protection bowls closer.
“No,” Jamal replied adamantly. “Abu Gharib has been nothing but hospitable. And though I am not a lamb to be fattened for slaughter, I am eating plenty. Perhaps reading a bit too late at night judging from the amount we spend on lamp oil but nothing dire.”
A hesitant knock sounded against the door and then a moment later, Majed stepped into the courtyard, Marjana peeking out from behind his robe.
Jamal beamed. “Father of maps! Peace be upon you. And . . . Marjana?” He gave me a surprised look. “Your letter didn’t mention—”
“No, it did not,” I said swiftly, not wanting Marjana to hear anything further about the contents of my letter to Jamal. “My unexpected surprise. Apparently someone decided she needed to accompany me so badly that it was worth stowing away in the cargo hold with only a witless cat for company.”
“Oh. Oh.” Jamal blinked. “No, you should not do that. Running away to sea to pursue your dreams is a terrible idea.” He winked at me and then beckoned Marjana closer.
“Come! You have had a long journey. Introductions and rest.” He presented his uncle to Marjana and Majed, then rustled up cushions and refreshments, turning down our offers of help.
Eccentric uncle and snake-footed demons aside, it gave me pleasure to see Jamal at ease and at home.
The half-dead youth I had rescued was long gone, a confident and mature apprentice in their place.
By the time we devoured two platters of apricot pastries, Marjana was nodding off. I met Jamal’s gaze with an intentional signal, and he rose smoothly to his feet.
“Nakhudha, we should catch up,” he suggested. “Uncle, would you mind keeping Marjana company?”
“Certainly!” Abu Gharib gave her a gap-toothed grin. “Would you like to see a mermaid? My grandfather had it stuffed in Bahrain.”
Marjana straightened up, promptly awake. “Yes.”
“Then get some sleep!” I called over my shoulder as the rest of us followed Jamal through a dusty curtain.
To say the al-Hilli’s ancestral home was a remarkable place would be an understatement.
It reminded me more of a warehouse than anything, its yawning corridors stuffed to the brim with books and scrolls, cabinets and curiosities.
It was also a mess. Texts were stacked haphazardly up to the ceiling and priceless statues used to prop open doors and hang laundry.
Broken tiles littered antique rugs in desperate need of a beating and several glass display cases were so grimy that it was impossible to examine their contents.
Birds swooped in through a high open window, a pigeon nesting in a carved cornice of the ceiling.
The smell of old parchment and the peppermint oil used to keep said old parchment free of insects was so thick on the air that I sneezed more than once, nearly toppling a stone idol of a serpent-eyed, winged woman.
“Please excuse the state of the place,” Jamal said, with obvious shame. “Abu Gharib has been alone for years and the upkeep is too much for one person. I’m trying to set it to rights, but it’s going to take a long time.”
“No judgment from me.” I set the idol back in place. “These artifacts remind me of your library in Aden.”
“This collection is actually older. And vaster. What my family brought to Yemen were just some selected favorites, which means that some of the books and artifacts intended as a collection are now divided. There is nothing more disappointing than finishing a fascinating volume and realizing its partner is gone forever.”
“You don’t know that,” I said gently. “God willing, there will come a day when you and your grandmother meet in peace again. Perhaps you can arrange for the books to be returned.”
Jamal scoffed. “She likely sold off the contents of our library the day she received my letter,” he replied, referencing the note I had delivered to Lady Salima explaining his decision to part ways with his old life and identity.
“Or burned them. But let us not talk of the past. This,” he said, leading us around the corner of the final corridor, “is what I pray will be my future.”
It was as though we had entered an entirely different building.
Everything was freshly dusted, the carpet washed and vibrant, the window screened with newly woven thatch.
Neatly repaired bookshelves lined the walls, stacked with embossed leather-bound texts and swirling Arabic calligraphy.
One cabinet was dedicated to fragile clay tablets with cuneiform letters, another to minuscule cylinder seals in carnelian, agate, jade, and lapis.
More shelves held precisely arranged figurines of carved alabaster, graceful magical animals and men with wreath-like kilts and large, luminous black eyes.
High upon each of the four walls were protective verses of the Quran, reigning over all.
“The small portion I’ve managed to clean up and properly document,” Jamal said proudly.
“Abu Gharib says the collection fell into disarray as the family scattered. Centuries ago, there would have been a dozen al-Hillis working to maintain the archive and take commissions. I intend to restore it all.”
Tinbu gaped. “There must be thousands of books and artifacts in here. Tens of thousands! You’re only one person and half the texts look like they’ll disintegrate if you breathe too hard upon them.”
“Then it is good I do not breathe too hard.” Jamal grinned, clearly overjoyed to be sentenced to a lifelong task many might have considered a punishment.
Majed marveled at the books. “Astonishing. The amount of effort and care that must have gone into gathering such items . . .”
“Our collection predates Baghdad,” Jamal said. “According to family lore, it predates even the Persian kings in this land. My ancestors have been here since the rise of Babylon.”
“God be praised,” I said sincerely. I had a warier relationship with magic than did Jamal, but even I could recognize this place was a jewel. “I pray that uncle of yours is careful. A toppled lamp and you could lose the work of centuries.”
“Abu Gharib might seem . . . scattered,” Jamal conceded.
“But his heart is in the right place, and we are both very cautious. And Baghdad has stayed safe for us, despite its politics. It is a city of libraries, from our archives to the caliph’s house of wisdom, and one that has always been protected.
” He gestured to a clean space covered in a soft rug and several cushions.
“Why don’t you sit? While I am happy to discuss books, I suspect you did not come all this way to hear me wax poetic about family lore. ”
I sat, stretching my limbs. “What did you make of my letter?”
“The one warning of sorceresses and cursed spindles? I was intrigued, to say the least,” Jamal replied. “It sent me on quite the hunt through this jungle of knowledge.”
Tinbu blanched. “That sounds daunting.”
“Oh, no, it was wonderful!” Jamal was infused with the sort of excitement I’ve seen in those addled by dice anticipate their next game of chance. He dragged out a large trunk and unlocked the top, revealing neatly stacked books, scrolls, tablets, and other assorted artifacts nestled inside.
Nothing I could see had an alphabet even remotely familiar. Indeed, I wasn’t certain some even were alphabets. “Jamal, you are overestimating our abilities.”
“Merely showing my sources, nakhudha.” He bent to dig into the trunk, his slight form nearly swallowed. “Let us start with this spindle.”
My hopes rose. “You found mention of it?”
“Truthfully, I found mentions of a dozen such objects.” Jamal straightened up, a plain wooden spindle in his hands.
It was smooth, polished by years of relentless work, but otherwise little more than a stick with a bulbous skirt at one end.
“A spindle. Undoubtedly one of humanity’s oldest tools, simple and essential to any culture that requires cloth.
Silk for the sultan, flax for the farmer—a spindle turns it all from a heap of fluff to the threads that garb our people, from the blankets that welcome newborn babies to the shrouds that wrap our dead.
It is an astonishingly profound symbol if you stop and contemplate it.
And yet why would we, this instrument that is among the earliest a child is taught to master? ”
“You sound like a sheikh,” Tinbu teased good-naturedly. “I pray that means the good professor has discovered a way to ease our quest?”
But Jamal’s expression was not encouraging.
“Notions of spinning and weaving are entangled with magic in a great number of tales; it is an unparalleled metaphor for fate. There are numerous cultures who taught that various deities—almost always female—controlled the lives of both immortals and divine beings with such textile work, from a trio of sisters in the ancient Greek sagas to a spider goddess from this land’s forgotten past.” Jamal hesitated.
“But if the stories I read had anything in common, it was that these threads were unfathomably powerful. They could be cut and rearranged, yes, but there was no outwitting or escaping the fate already spun for us.”
“‘It is written,’” Majed said softly, echoing our own faith. “I suppose we are not alone in our beliefs.”
“It is hard to blame the peris for wanting to destroy an object that interferes in all that,” I admitted.
“Who says it’s interfering?” Tinbu countered. “Perhaps the spindle is only doing what it was created to do.”
“You are not the first people to have such a debate,” Jamal said, reaching for a leather-bound journal with thick bindings. “Some of my ancestors did as well, and it was their discussions that caught my eye.”
“Did the al-Hillis come upon this spindle?” I asked.
“I believe they might have. I discovered a mention of a similar artifact at Ctesiphon, shortly before the conquest. It was during the last days of the Persian kings and their wars with the Rumi . . .” Jamal gently turned the fragile pages.
“There was a vicious, unnatural plague that killed every member of the ruling family and their supporters but left the rest of the population untouched. The only survivor from the palace was an aggrieved noble, a former court rival who offered ‘an ensorcelled weaving device’ to what was left of the Persian forces after the city fell. Apparently haunted by guilt, he blamed himself for weakening his people and leaving them open to Arab invaders. He cut his wrists and wrote the letter in his blood.”
“God forbid,” Majed said, looking unsettled. “Did they believe him?”
“Well, we’re having this conversation in Arabic instead of Persian shortly after salah was called in the city that replaced Ctesiphon, which now consists of a single arch, so no, I do not believe any ensorcelled spindles were successfully used to defend the shahs.
But the al-Hilli records include a second account about a century earlier which sounds similar—and one in which they participated. ”
“Participated?” Tinbu repeated.
“The incantation bowls in the courtyard are not just for show, my friend. We are exorcists when necessary and have been for a very long time. My ancestors were called to expel a demon in a village outside Erbil, far to the north. A wife claimed her husband’s slave girl grew jealous and bewitched her.
But by the time they arrived . . .” Jamal’s voice faltered.
“What?” Majed asked.
“The wife had slaughtered her entire family. She insisted they were imposters intent on enslaving and murdering her true loved ones. The female slave in question was long gone, but when the rest were questioned, one said the girl had kept a spindle on her person at all times and would whisper to it at night. No one spoke her tongue, so they were not certain what she said. Neither were ever found and there was no further mention of the spindle.”
There was an ominous pause.
I cleared my throat. “Now, that sounds like the spindle the peris are after.”
“Or a tall tale,” Tinbu pointed out. “People blame slaves—particularly foreign ones—for every little thing. The wilder and more scandalous the stories, the better.”
“Discerning the truth in some of these accounts is impossible,” Jamal agreed. “Regardless, if this object does exist . . . the possibilities are terrifying. If whoever possesses the spindle should learn of your intent to steal it—”
“We might have our minds rewritten and murder each other.” Sighing, I fell into a dusty cushion, massaging my knee. It seemed to know my weaknesses, pain flaring in the accursed joint at the worst moments.
Majed frowned. “Was there no mention of Lab? This supposed sorceress of eons who plays with mortals like toys?”
Jamal nodded his head. “It is apparently Queen Lab. The story I uncovered spoke of her ruling over not a magical prison, but a wondrous White City.”
“Truly?” I should have known my instinct to reach out to Jamal was a good one; his obsession with the occult might have once landed him in Falco Palamenestra’s claws but it was now paying off handsomely. “What else can you tell us of her?”
“Well.” He blushed. “It is only a single tale and a rather bizarre one. And not the most . . . ah, appropriate.”
“Is it worse than someone massacring their family or writing letters in their dwindling lifeblood?” Majed asked dryly.
Jamal shook his head. “The other sort of scandal.”
“Sex?” When Jamal turned pinker, I snorted. “We are old, Jamal, not dead.”
“Nakhudha, I doubt even you . . .” He immediately flustered. “Not that I think you are a particular sort—”
Tinbu and Majed burst into laughter.
“Oh, shut up, both of you.” I turned back to Jamal. “Speak. I am intrigued.”
“Then fortunately you can read this one yourself.” Jamal reached for a slim text. “The collection is in Arabic: from Tales of the Marvelous and News of the Strange, the account of Julnar the Seaborn—”
“Tragically I cannot read Arabic,” Tinbu intoned, a stretch of the truth. “Tell it to us yourself.”
Jamal gave me an imploring look, but I shrugged. “You wished to be a storyteller, no?”
“I wished to relate intriguing accounts with a dash of true historical learning,” he huffed. “But fine, let us speak of incompetent princes.”