The Dervish House (8 page)
Authors: Ian Mcdonald
Can doesn’t hear the door open. Can doesn’t hear anything. The chase across the rooftops is silent. He only looks up from the robot-versus-robot action when light from the open door dazzles him. A shadow, a sun-blurred spindly alien-thing. His mum. She signs. Can frowns. He always sits facing the door so that he will know when someone comes in but also because the visitor can’t see what he is doing on his computer. Can isn’t allowed excitement. She would cry. Unable to shout or shake or strike, she’s forced into self-martyrdom. See how you’ve made me feel?
She signs again.
Have you got a clean shirt for school this afternoon?
Have you got a clean shirt for school this afternoon?
Can knows better than to nod. That would make her feel hurt because he was being rude and disrespectful. She might even ask what was so important he couldn’t talk to his mother. His hands can’t afford the time away from the screen but he signs:
There’s one in the wardrobe
.
There’s one in the wardrobe
.
Good
, she says. The silhouette moves in the bright light as if to go, then turns back.
What are you doing anyway?
, she says. The silhouette moves in the bright light as if to go, then turns back.
What are you doing anyway?
Can’s heart flutters.
‘Just playing with Monkey.’ It’s no lie.
Well, just you don’t go annoying anyone with him, all right?
Then she vanishes into the light and the door closes. Can lets out a hiss of concentration and bends over his roll-up screen. Speed power navigation security. A cat flees as Monkey and its hunter gallop across the rooftop and swing up a water-tank gantry on to the next roof. Distance five metres, power at twelve per cent. Can wonders who is behind those insect eyes; what face lit by what screen.
Then she vanishes into the light and the door closes. Can lets out a hiss of concentration and bends over his roll-up screen. Speed power navigation security. A cat flees as Monkey and its hunter gallop across the rooftop and swing up a water-tank gantry on to the next roof. Distance five metres, power at twelve per cent. Can wonders who is behind those insect eyes; what face lit by what screen.
Whoever you are, Can Durukan Boy Detective will amaze and bamboozle you!
Can clenches his fist to summon the reserves from the batteries, then flings his hand open to send Monkey leaping high over the concrete coaming. The hunter-bot leaps after him.
Got you! You thought there was a roof but there is nothing but twenty metres of empty air
. Can brings his hands together in a silent clap. Falling Monkey explodes into its component BitBots. Nanorobots rain down on to Vermilion-Maker Lane. Can crosses his thumbs and waggles his fingers. The cloud of mite-machines ripples, darkens into smoke and coalesces into a pair of gossamer wings. A bird; Can’s Bird. Power is critical, but Bird beats its wings, swoops over the heads of the men squatting on their teashop stools, so low they duck. Three beats four, and he pulls up out of Vermilion-Maker Lane. In his rear-view camera he sees the hunting bot smashed like a porcelain crab on the cobbles. Shards and splinters and scraps of yellow shell. He turns over Adem Dede square, a great white stork sliding home.
Can clenches his fist to summon the reserves from the batteries, then flings his hand open to send Monkey leaping high over the concrete coaming. The hunter-bot leaps after him.
Got you! You thought there was a roof but there is nothing but twenty metres of empty air
. Can brings his hands together in a silent clap. Falling Monkey explodes into its component BitBots. Nanorobots rain down on to Vermilion-Maker Lane. Can crosses his thumbs and waggles his fingers. The cloud of mite-machines ripples, darkens into smoke and coalesces into a pair of gossamer wings. A bird; Can’s Bird. Power is critical, but Bird beats its wings, swoops over the heads of the men squatting on their teashop stools, so low they duck. Three beats four, and he pulls up out of Vermilion-Maker Lane. In his rear-view camera he sees the hunting bot smashed like a porcelain crab on the cobbles. Shards and splinters and scraps of yellow shell. He turns over Adem Dede square, a great white stork sliding home.
Can’s hands shake. There’s a tightness in the back of his throat and nose of wanting to cry and he needs a pee. His heart thuds tight in his chest, his breath flutters in his throat, his face burns with excitement now that he realizes he was in danger. While he was running it was a game, the best game he has ever played. Now he can think about what would have happened if the men behind the robot had followed him, had come to his door and knocked on it. Now he can be afraid. But he is proud; more proud of escaping the hunter than of anything he has ever done. He wants to tell people. But the kids in the special school are too stupid to understand or have something very wrong with them. His parents: Can knows he would never crawl out from under his mother’s self-flagellation and his father’s silence.
Mr Ferentinou. He will listen. He will know. What he doesn’t know he can guess and his guesses are always right. He was famous for that, so he tells Can. Can Durukan goes to the edge of the balcony, peers into the brilliant morning breaking over Eskiköy and lifts a hand to catch Bird coming home.
You are a fine gentleman of Iskenderun, old Alexandretta, some time in the middle decades of Eighteenth Christian Century, a subject of Sultan Osman III. His empire has ebbed far from its zenith at the gates of Vienna. It is the magic blue hour of the house of Ösmanli. All seems radiant and still and suspended as if it might carry on in this shell-like turquoise forever. But the night draws inexorably in. Imperial Constantinople may console itself in grand buildings of mosques and baths and imperial tombs but Alexandretta is far from the Sublime Porte and feels the winds from the east and the north more closely. It has always been a cosmopolis of many races and confessions where the trade routes from Central Asia meet the sea-lanes from Italy and the far Atlantic. In those caravanserais and hans you made your wealth. In your prime you were a travelled man, west to Marseilles and Cadiz, east to Lahore and Samarkand; to the north, Moscow and, as befits a religious man once in his life, south to Mecca as a hacı. Now you are old; you have retired to your shaded house where the cool sea breeze brings news from the corners of the empire and the greater world beyond. The great age of peace and prosperity is ending. Your wife is dead these five years; your sons manage your interests and your daughters are adequately married. Life’s obligations are fulfilled. It is time to leave. One morning you order your staff,
bring me a bowl of pine honey
. You eat it all up with a silver spoon in a quiet room of your house that has no clocks. Again, for your midday meal:
bring me a bowl of pine honey
. In the evening; a bowl of pine honey. Only honey.
bring me a bowl of pine honey
. You eat it all up with a silver spoon in a quiet room of your house that has no clocks. Again, for your midday meal:
bring me a bowl of pine honey
. In the evening; a bowl of pine honey. Only honey.
By the third day of nothing but honey the servants have gossiped it abroad. By Friday prayers it is all across the city. Your many friends come to call, a river of them for you are a household name in Alexandretta, but not before your sons and daughters. The women weep, the men ask,
What possessed you to choose this bizarre act? You say, a tumour the size of a pomegranate. I can feel it inside me, it is months since I could enjoy a piss without pain. It would be the death of me and I can’t defeat that but I can arrange a different appointment with Azrael
. By now the servants have soaked the curtains in vinegar to keep the flies from you.
What possessed you to choose this bizarre act? You say, a tumour the size of a pomegranate. I can feel it inside me, it is months since I could enjoy a piss without pain. It would be the death of me and I can’t defeat that but I can arrange a different appointment with Azrael
. By now the servants have soaked the curtains in vinegar to keep the flies from you.
Doctors are called, European trained. They come from the room that now smells of sweet honey-sweat to tell the waiting sons and sons-in-law that there is nothing they can do, you are set upon this process and it will take its course. Not even the imam can sway you from what you have decided to become. It is unusual but it has a long and noble history. In the second week of your transformation you express a taste for exotic and rare honeys: the blends and the regionals, from the potent aphid-sucked honey-dew of the fir forests of the Vosges and southern Germany to the delicately floral Thousand Flower honey of Bordeaux. In the third week of your transfiguration you explore honeys of theft and peril; wild acacia honey of the savage hives of Africa where the foragers have grown immune to stings that would kill lesser men; honey from the Sundarbans of Bengal where tigers stalk the hive-hunters in the mangrove forests; the carob honeys from the bazaars of Fes, stolen in the high Atlas from legendary hives the size of houses. In your moments of lucidity between swimming in golden sugar-hallucinations you realize that you are now the empire’s greatest connoisseur of honey and that this precious knowledge could easily pass from the world. You hire an amanuensis, a tarikat-trained boy of a good family and excellent calligraphy to write down your ravings on the honeys that your servants now drip by the spoonful on to your tongue. In the fourth week you explore the high paths of sweetness; the single flower honeys. Such is your skill now that you can taste a single drop and say that this is a myrrh honey from Arabia, that is a thyme honey from Cyprus, that is orange blossom honey from Bulgaria and that, unmistakably, is cedar honey from the Levant. Beyond the borders of the empire you discover sleep-scented lavender honey from Spain and the cactus honey of Mexico. For two days you savour and describe the bitter, mentholic darkness of the Sardinian Corbozello honey made from the flowers of the wild arbutus. Over three days you are gripped in hallucinations of the rhododendron honey of the Himalayas. Towards the end there are days when you are lost entirely in the golden light that glows behind your permanently-drawn blinds and you utter honey-prophecies and oozing sugar-visions but when you ask your secretary to read your ravings back there is not one word written on his page. By now your pores exude not sweat but a gold-tinged ichor. Your urine is as sweet as a confection, your excrement a soft amber unguent. Honey permeates every vessel of your body; honey swaddles your organs and drips in oozing globules through the spaces of your brain.
The transition from waking world to dream, from dream to coma and from coma to death is sweet, subtle and as slow as the fall of a tear of honey from a spoon. The doctor confirms with his little mirror that all breath has left your body. Your secretary stands shaking with hidden tears, clutching his treatise on honey as the blinds are thrown open. Your daughters are already keening, your sons have one last task to perform. The imam makes the consignment as the servants wash the corpse that smells of thyme and lavender, pine and myrrh and orange-flower. Now your sons must work fast. The great stone coffin, an ancient pagan Roman thing, has already been filled with honey. Your body is slowly submerged in it; great bubbles rising slowly through the amber liquid as you sink. The lid is slid into position and as it is sealed with lead the remaining spaces are filled with yet more honey poured through a hole bored through the mouth of the pagan goddess until a single drop of gold forms on her lips. Then that too is sealed with molten lead. Men and many horses - all the men of goodwill who knew you in life - carry you through the streets of Alexandretta to the warehouse where you have caused the grave to be dug. The marker is set in the place of the paving slab. It reads, Hacı Ferhat, 1191-1268 - and a second date: Berat Kandili 1450.
Every trade has its fabled beasts, its Rocs and Cyclops and Djinni that can whisk you from the dome of Baghdad to Samarkand in a thought. Lawyers have monster murderers and celebrity defendants who have defamed Turkishness or merely pulled off a breathtaking scam. Traders have their stellar players who read the market in one moment of piercing insight and made unimaginable fortunes. The media is rife with the vices of actors and the eccentricities of editors, producers and directors. Musicians’ whims and contract riders are legendary. The neglected, dusty corner of antiquarians and manuscript dealers is no different. There are its grails, its lost codices, forbidden grimoires and Hands of Glory and, stalking the honeyed path between them, the Mellified Man.
They are creatures of antiquarians’ legends, Mellified Men. Once in a lifetime one may turn up in the vast bazaars of Damascus or Cairo, walking out of a remote and alien history. They command fearful prices, insane money, for they are the embodiment of powerful magics. Even the djinn respect a Mellified Man. At the due date on the tombstone the casket is unsealed. When the lid is removed what remains is a human confection. Honey suffuses every channel and organ, honey fuses with flesh, honey permeates every cell. Sugar is a powerful preservative and antibacterial. The unfamiliar sun turns the thing in the coffin to gold. Now the Mellified Man’s true work begins.
The body is broken up into pieces the size of a cube of baklava. These are applied to cure all manners of ill and wounds. The flesh of a Mellified Man, soft as semolina halva, has the power to cure diseases, heal wounds, mend broken bones. Smeared on the eyelids it melts away cataracts; it can restore hearing to deaf ears. Spread on the genitals, it renews potency. Taken internally is the most efficacious method. A tiny dose melted on the tongue will dissolve cancers, clear phlegm from clogged lungs, refresh the great organs, stoke up cooling digestive fires, eradicate any stone or gall or ulcer. Even the hair from the mummy’s head, thick and syrupy as a strand of kedayıf pastry, is a famous cure for baldness.
‘You don’t work for any length of time in this business without someone boasting that they’ve seen a Mellified Man,’ Ayşe says. She is very aware of her own breathing. ‘And I am aware that they’re more than just legends but in my experience they were strictly medieval.’ A void has opened in the sanity of things and she teeters on the brink. The Persian miniatures of Belkis and the Prophet that line the walls swirl without ever changing position. This is an echo of the age of miracles in this third decade of the twenty-first century. But if there is one place where a Mellified Man could walk out of magical time, where the fantastical and the mundane routinely come into contact, where the djinn touch toe to earth, it is surely Istanbul.
‘Oh no no no,’ says Akgün. In the private viewing room Ayşe can closely study her guest. The nanoweave fabric of his suit has closed in the air-conditioned cool and his clothing shimmers like Damascus steel. The watch is high-marque, the manicure exquisite from the tips of his nails to his cufflinks. The shave is business-close but there is something about the man does not smell right. His cologne is
Arslan
. Even an ultra Cimbom fan like Adnan would never wear an aroma branded for a Galatasaray striker. ‘People put too much faith in Li Shizhen’s account. There is good evidence that a Mellified Man was sold in Tashkent to traditional Chinese medical practitioners as recently as 1912.’
Arslan
. Even an ultra Cimbom fan like Adnan would never wear an aroma branded for a Galatasaray striker. ‘People put too much faith in Li Shizhen’s account. There is good evidence that a Mellified Man was sold in Tashkent to traditional Chinese medical practitioners as recently as 1912.’
‘Yes, but that’s a long way from an eighteenth-century Mellified Man from Alexandretta.’
‘You are absolutely right to be sceptical. That’s why I’ve brought provenances.’
Inside the impact-carbon briefcase is another, in supple honey-coloured leather. It would not surprise Ayşe if it were human skin. It carries a small tulip-shaped tattoo. Her scanners tell her the mark is a blossom of tracker molecules. Within the case is a waxed paper wallet, within that the folio itself, leather bound with an ornate rosette in gold leaf set on a medallion on the cover.
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