The Sleeping Sands
Read The Sleeping Sands Online
Authors: Nat Edwards
The Sleeping Sands
A Henry Layard Adventure
Nat Edwards
Text © 2012 by Nat Edwards
All rights reserved
C
ONTENTS
N
AMED
C
HARACTERS IN
T
HE
S
LEEPING
S
ANDS
H
ISTORICAL
N
OTE
T
HE FOLLOWING STORY IS A WORK OF FICTION
. Having said that, most of it is true. All of the places in it are real – although spellings of place names are generally how they were recorded by Henry Layard in the 1840s and may not exactly correspond with modern spelling. A great many of the events documented happened – although not always quite in the same way as described. Very nearly all of the people actually existed, although they were not necessarily quite like their characters here. Some of the monsters in the story are made up and some are real.
The story starts with a tower. That tower really did exist – just as described. Its builder, the Matamet, also existed – just as described. In fact, I suspect that he still does.
Your visions, I will oppose
My mind's paths, I will close
You said, this night-farer knows
Another way will descend.
Hafez (translation by Shahriar Shahriari)
The scene around is worthy of the ruin he is contemplating; desolation meets desolation.
Henry Layard,
Nineveh and its Remains
Reproduced from
Early Adventures in Persia, Susiana, and Babylonia
by Sir A. Henry Layard, London, John Murray 1894
P
ROLOGUE
T
HE
T
OWER
I
T SEEMED THAT AS LONG AS THE MAN COULD REMEMBER
the world had begun with a twisted pine tree at the very left-hand edge of his vision and stretched across a vastness of sky to the peaks of the Zagros Mountains at his very right. These things, the sky, the tree and the mountains, were the things he would fix his gaze upon, rather than the view that occupied the centre of his vision. Now, as the unseen sun began to set, somewhere beyond the pine tree, the few puffy trails of cloud in the sky were lit up with brilliant purples and gold. A rosy light flooded the distant mountains the colour of a young Shiraz. It was almost possible for the man to find the view beautiful or, at the very least, to find the view an approximation of what he had once thought of as beauty. It would still seem beautiful had the sun and the stench and the memory of the pain not driven even the faintest echo of the idea of beauty from the man’s mind.
Nearby, a francolin called, its urgent and mechanical
ki-ki-ki
answered by another. Over their tinny rhythm a hidden warbler creaked its thin, reedy notes. The crows, as ever, were still cawing, their cries more raucous and excited by the promise of approaching dusk. There were always so many birds. In the centre of his view, the part that he did not choose to see, he could hear the flapping and scrabbling of other birds. Something fell upon his cheek. Something wet.
Above the racket of the crows, the man fancied that he heard the first yapping cries of the jackals. Fancy or not, he knew that he would soon hear them, despite the best efforts of those other voices – the ones he listened for and longed for – to drive them away.
He ran his gaze once more across the view. Using both eyes, he started with the pine tree, noting its twisted, desiccated branches, its remnant of stubborn dead needles and its one, uninhabited woodpecker hole. As the detail of each grain, crack and knot of the tree was etched out by the dying light, the hole stared at the man like a single black eye. He returned the stare for a while until he began to imagine a malevolence gazing back at him from the tree. His point of visual refuge now polluted by something alien, he turned his gaze away. He rolled his eyes high in their sockets and moved them slowly across the purple sky, which could no longer burn them as it did during the day. Had he still been able to produce them, the effort would have brought tears into his eyes. He managed, for the most part to roll his vision over that thing that sat in the centre of his field of view and settled on the mountains, picking out far-off snow hollows and familiar rock formations. He had named each of them during his long vigil. Sometimes he had forgotten the names or had perhaps confused one formation with another but this evening, he was fairly sure that he could recognise them all. There was the ibex. Beside it, the leopard. Rearing above them, at the crest of a peak, the stallion. The man momentarily closed his eyes to listen for its whinnying cry, willing it to echo across the mountains and into the valley, its thundering hoofs drumming down the hillside to carry him off. He thought of another horse, this one of warm flesh and blood. A word formed in his mind.
Rustem
. Proud, wild, brave Rustem, speared in the belly by one of the Matamet’s soldiers. How was it that he could remember such a thing, when it seemed he had spent all of his life considering this same view? In an attempt to push the confusing memory from his mind, he resumed his inspection of the view, this time moving from right to left, with just his right eye open.
When he once more looked upon the pine tree the man closed his right eye and opened his left. He saw nothing but a dim redness. In a panic, he opened both eyes wide, gasping as his cracked and burning throat tightened. It was still there. It was all still there. He slowly closed one eye and then another. It was all still there. It was just his eye that was gone.
In place of panic, the man felt perplexed. Had the birds taken his eye? Where were those other voices, the listened-for, longed-for voices that kept the birds away? Where were the voices that had wailed for so long around him? Where were the voices that had cursed and screamed? Where was that one, gentle voice whose coming had always heralded the cool sensation of water on his cracked lips and the sweet taste of dates or grapes upon his ulcerated and swollen tongue? For as long as he could remember, there were always so many of the voices – a great chorus that once had filled the valley with sound. Voices that threatened; voices that begged; voices that bargained; voices that denounced; voices that prayed; voices that soothed. When did those voices fade? Was it one by one, or did they all fall still at once and the man only listen to their dying echoes, diminishing with each day and with each visual sweep of his world? Were there ever voices at all or had it been his fantasy; giving familiar words and accents to the yapping of the jackals and the laughter of the striped hyenas?
The light was fading fast now. Once more, there was a flapping, rustling and tearing in front of him and something wet fell on his cheek. The man turned his good eye to the view before him.
He remembered. The men of the Mamesenni tribe had been laughing and singing when they had ridden out against the serbázes of the Matamet. They were confident that the justice of their case and their reputation as the finest horsemen and best shots in the Zagros range would serve them well in their negotiations. How could they hope to pay the Matamet’s levies when their crops had failed so badly and when the mountain passes had been shut for two months longer than usual, preventing their usual trade with Shiraz and Bushehr? They would offer hostages in good faith and undertake to pay higher levies in the coming years until their debt to the Shah was cleared. The Matamet had met them on the plain of Marv Dasht, his tents pitched in the shadows of the columns of the ancient city of Persepolis. They were delighted when he agreed to hear their case and even more so when he dismissed their offer of hostages. They were proud when he affirmed that he had no need of hostages to secure the word of the Mamesenni, whom all of Isfahan knew were pure-blooded, honourable Persians, just as the Mamesenni should not do him the injustice of refusing his hospitality.
At the banquet hosted by the Matamet to celebrate their treaty, all three hundred Mamesenni warriors were captured, without a single shot. A force of serbázes, led by the Matamet’s own ferrashes fell upon them as they took their meat. That handful who managed to fight their way from the tent found themselves facing a wall of lances. The man had been in this desperate group and, leaping onto Rustem, who was tethered among the Mamesenni horses nearest to the banquet tent, he had tried to charge through the ring of lancers and make a break for freedom. He remembered the horse’s scream as its belly was split open by an Arab spearman’s ostrich-feathered lance.