The Sleeping Sands Read online

  The Sleeping Sands

  A Henry Layard Adventure

  Nat Edwards

  Text © 2012 by Nat Edwards

  All rights reserved

  CONTENTS

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  PROLOGUE

  BOOK I – THE DESERT

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  BOOK II – THE MOUNTAINS

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  BOOK III – THE MARSHES

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  EPILOGUE

  NAMED CHARACTERS IN THE SLEEPING SANDS

  GLOSSARY

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  THE 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

  PROLOGUE

  THE TOWER

  IT 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 Matam
et 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.

  The Matamet would not allow his soldiers to harm the tribesmen. He had, he joked, offered them his word of a truce. Rather, he said, he would build a monument to their valour in opposing the Shah, which should serve as an inspiration for the whole province. Some among the younger tribesmen took heart from his words and continued to hope for mercy. The older and wiser men kept their counsel and watched; grim and silent as soldiers were sent out to clear and level a patch of ground, not far from the ruined city, in view of the Zagros Mountains and beside an ancient, twisted pine.

  The Governor of Isfahan proved as ingenious an architect as he was a crafty negotiator. To begin the building, he had a thick layer of mortar laid, in a circle of about fourteen feet in diameter. Around this circle were laid ten men, their wrists and ankles bound, so that their feet faced each other’s and so that each man’s head was clear of the circle. The gaps formed between each of their bodies and by the smaller circle of their feet were carefully filled using bricks from the ruins of the ancient city. When they were set in place and all the gaps filled with bricks and mortar, a second thick layer of mortar was laid and a second tier of ten men added, again with each head free of the mortar and facing to the sky. The gaps carefully filled, a third layer was added and so on, until at last a thirty-storey tower graced the plain of Marv Dasht, competing with the ancient majesty of Persepolis.

  When their women found them, many of the Mamesenni warriors still lived. So artful was the tower’s design that, despite its great weight, only a very few had died from being crushed or choked by its construction and these were mostly in the bottom few tiers. Others, near to the bottom of the tower had succumbed to rats and snakes and several nearer the top had been lost to vultures and eagles. On the second night, a striped hyena had discovered the tower and on the third night it had made its first kill. By the time the women came, the mortar and bricks had baked so hard in the sun that it was impossible to free the warriors. Even if the women had possessed the tools or the strength after their long journey on foot to try to free their men, a guard of Arab lancers had been left in the vicinity by the Matamet to ensure no such attempt was made. Still, many of the warriors lived and of those some still retained their eyes or even, in a few cases, enough reason to recognise their loved ones.

  So the women stayed. Some wept and mourned while others comforted and prayed. Some brave souls even tried to sing a lullaby, while holding a water skin to their lover’s cracked lips. Desperate to reach men on the upper tiers, women would clamber over the heads of the living and the dead alike, praying, when they heard a weakened neck snap, that it had been one of the dead ones.

  The women stayed while the men died. Soon, disease became rife around the tower and the women too began to die. With fewer living men to care for each day, the risk of infection growing and no hope of recovering the bodies, the women began to drift away. There were fewer women each day to drive off the predators and carrion birds. In time the tower became a place of birds, no longer intimidated by the small group of sickening, weakened women and their futile attempts to preserve what little life was left. Their voices became weaker and diminished until one day there were only birds.

  The voices were all gone. Even his own, as he tried to scream out what was left of his agony and rage. Nothing but a cracked whisper came out, like the sound of a few blades of dead grass blowing across a marble floor. He remembered and he knew that he was the last. He knew that night would fall and that beasts would come and that he would never again gaze upon his pine tree nor his beloved mountains nor hear that listened-for, longed-for voice that had kept him alive for all of this eternity. He remembered.

  He remembered and he spoke. Summoning the last reservoirs of his hatred and his loss, he whispered his curse. He whispered it to the pine tree, to the sky, and to the mountains. He whispered it to those last congealing drops of the elemental mountain blood in his veins. To that blood he whispered it, as it drained from his body and permeated the porous mortar and bricks of the tower. To that blood he whispered it as it joined with the blood and fluids of three hundred warriors and sank deep into the fissures of the rocks below. To that blood he whispered his curse and, deep below, something answered.

  BOOK I

  THE DESERT

  CHAPTER 1

  BEHIND THE HEAVY WOODEN DOOR, THE HOUSE ECHOED DULLY with the young man’s knocking. No other sound gave any evidence of life. He waited, trying to pick out any faint noise above the usual business of the street. Nothing. He knocked again, this time less politely, unconsciously folding the letter he held in his left hand.

  In the dusty street, his dragoman, Antonio, absently scratched the ears of one of the mules, all the while looking around with his habitually nervous glances. Away from the breeze of the scrubby olive and pomegranate groves in the hills around the town, the early afternoon sun burned. The young man was uncomfortably aware of the heat and the sweat dripping down his back. He screwed up his eyes against the relentless sun, listening. The hot air smelt of charcoal smoke and animal dung, with the faintest hint of wild thyme. He knocked again. Still nothing from the house; just the cries of men and animals from the street and the sound of a nearby brush sweeping rhythmically over stone. He had never been good at waiting. He hammered on the door once more, calling out, ‘Elias!’

  ‘Elias is not here, Effendi.’

  An old woman had been watching the tall European. Distracted from sweeping the doorway of the neighbouring house, her curiosity about the stranger had overcome her modesty.

  ‘You won’t find Elias here – the house is empty.’

  Mustering his Arabic, the European asked in a faltering tongue, ‘where is Elias? I have a letter. I need to see him.’

  The old woman grinned, her lined face breaking into a web of ancient creases, picked out in the afternoon sun. She shuffled over to get a closer look at the stranger. She smelt of age and rosewater. The woman spat in the dust and spoke again, rapidly, her shyness now completely forgotten in the light of an opportunity to gossip about her neighbour. His ear defeated by the woman’s enthusiasm, the young man turned to his dragoman and spoke to him in Italian.

  ‘What is she saying, Antonio?’

  ‘The man, Elias, is a tax collector, Effendi. She says that he has been thrown in prison by the Muteselim for cheating good Muslims.’ He exchanged a few more words with the woman. ‘She says that when he was arrested, all his servants ran away and the house is empty. We will find no shelter here, Effendi.’

  A curse began to form on the European’s lips. He remembered that Antonio, raised by Italian friars, was not worldly and, stifling the curse, turned instead to thank the woman; despite her rather indecorous glee at the fate of her Christian neighbour.

  ‘Come Antonio, it’s too hot to tarry here.’ He walked over to the mules, running his fingers over their packs and mentally noting all of the equipment and his long double barrelled gun were secured and present. ‘We will se
ek out the Muteselim and deliver both his and Elias’s letters. He will no doubt give us lodgings.’

  The old woman watched the men go. Strangers were no uncommon sight in the town of Hebron, particularly at the house of Elias, who prided himself on his hospitality to travellers. Arabs, Jews and Christians from neighbouring villages; officers of the Egyptian government, Turks and even occasional Europeans all found business in the town or else passed through, en route to Jerusalem. The woman had spent seventy years watching strangers come and go. She entertained the conceit of the old that she could read their characters and tell their secret purposes. She saw some of them dripping with greed and the desire to make money (more often than not at the expense of pious Arabs). She smelled the blood on shiftless, wild desert dwellers, looking for throats to cut and the delight of violence and robbery. Some visitors came to foment revolt and others to crush it. Some came as shadows; tools of strange and godless foreign powers who would bend the sacred lands to their wills. Others simply looked lost or afraid, on their way to be engulfed by the vastness of the desert. She watched them all as she swept her doorway or tended her little dusty orchard. Beating her carpets in time with the rhythm of their feet, tramping through the years past her door, she had grown complacently familiar with all their purposes and permutations.

  Watching the two men become gradually swallowed by the bustle of the street and the haze of the afternoon heat, she could not escape a feeling that this traveller stood out from the others. It was not simply his physical presence. Even now, his tall figure could be made out, looming above the crowd as he turned the corner and disappeared from view. There had been something in the demanding urgency of his voice and the directness of his stare that had awakened some primitive sense in the woman. Far from the false wisdom of the old and complacent, this was a deeper and more fundamental certainty. That young man had been more completely free of fear than any being she had encountered and driven by something she could not explain but which left her both anxious and expectant. She returned to her sweeping, nodding to herself. Wherever it was, that young man was heading for trouble.