“My own father would not have left me weak and vulnerable to my enemies, and he wouldn’t have taken sides with the haters of Allah.”
To commence firing on your mark, type 1.
“Bismillah!” screamed Rostam. He fell forward, laying his forehead in the dust, trembling with terror.
Jân Muhammad’s finger descended over the keys, hesitated, then hung motionless in the air. He could not bring himself to murder this wretched old man. “Go!” he called. “Get off my hill! Go starve to death in the wilderness! Walk to Jerusalem and ask the forgiveness of the Mahdi!”
“‘Whoever forgives and amends, he shall have his just reward from Allah,’” quoted Rostam. He staggered off, away from the young man he had betrayed, away from the village that had turned him out.
Jân Muhammad closed his eyes tightly, wondering at his sudden change of heart. “In the profane mouth of an unbeliever,” he murmured, “even the words of the Prophet can lose their beauty.” Behind him, unheeded, his poor midday meal burned and was ruined. With his augmented vision, Jân Muhammad watched the old man until he was out of sight, swallowed up by the seared and withered expanse of waste.
Introduction to
Marîd Throws a Party
This was the first portion — two chapters — of the fourth Budayeen book, Word of Night, and the only part to actually have been written. When I met George in 1990 (not counting the several times we’d been in the same room and HADN’T met, but that’s another story), he was working on these. The Exile Kiss had just been published, and the editors asked him for an outline of Word of Night (untitled, then) so they could get a cover-painting done. George didn’t have an outline, but since they needed to know SOMETHING that happened in the book, he said it started out with a party at Marîd’s club, which was all he knew about what happened in the book at the time. Later he and I worked out an outline for it, a wonderful story which I had hoped, in the fullness of time, to see through to fruition.
When he died in 2002, these first two chapters were still all he had written.
Brilliant chapters, and what promised to be a wonderful book.
— Barb Hambly
Marîd Throws a Party
I KNOW THE MOST FRIGHTENING WORDS IN THE world.
Imagine waking up and having someone say, “Do you know what you did last night?” I shiver just thinking about it. I’ve heard those words before, and I pray to Allah I never hear them again.
It was Kmuzu who murmured that horrible question to me one morning. Kmuzu was a black African given to me by Friedlander Bey. I had not wanted a slave, just as I hadn’t wanted any of the other things Friedlander Bey had given me. Still, it just wasn’t good policy to turn Papa down. Everyone in the Budayeen — hell, everyone in the entire city — knew that.
Over the last few years, however, Kmuzu had become quite a lot more than a slave to me. He was someone I’d come to depend on; God well knew that I couldn’t always depend on myself. I needed someone like Kmuzu to look out for me from time to time. He was loyal and honest, a good man for a Christian.
Despite that, I could’ve done without the disapproval in his voice when he woke me up. I looked at him, my eyes bleary and my mouth tasting like I’d French-kissed a pigeon coop. “Yallah,” I groaned, feeling a booming throb in my head just behind my eyes.
“You need some breakfast, yaa Sidi,” Kmuzu said.
That was an infidel’s answer for everything: food. I didn’t want food, not ever again. The whole idea of breakfast was already nauseating me. “All right, you’re going to tell me anyway,” I said. “I’m a tough guy, I can take it. What’d I do last night?”
“There was a party.” He watched me trying to maneuver myself out of bed.
Yes, there had been a party, all right. It had been at my nightclub — well, the club I own with my partner, Chiriga. It had been a going-away party in my honor, because in a few days Papa and I were embarking on the pilgrimage to the holy city of Makkah.
This is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, something required of every Muslim at least once during his lifetime. Neither Friedlander Bey nor I had fulfilled that obligation, although we had spoken of making the hajj every year as the month of Dhul-Hijjah approached. Now this year, 1632 on the Islamic calendar, 2205 of the Christian era, we’d decided that we were at last both healthy enough and able. There was no way of knowing, of course, how many dead bodies would accumulate during our sacred and spiritual quest.
Anyway, to celebrate this holy undertaking, my friends had turned my place of business into an even more raucous den of licentiousness. I guess it seemed reasonable at the time. I only wished I could recall more of what had gone on.
I didn’t have any problem remembering what I’d done earlier in the day. I’d conspired with a Damascene whore to revenge myself on a man, someone who had betrayed my trust and stolen some money from me. The financial loss had been insignificant; it was the insult that had to be dealt with.
The man was Fuad, whom the people of the Budayeen called il-Manhous, which means something like “the Universally Despised.” When the Greek philosopher Plato sat down to consider the Ideal Form of “loser,” it was Fuad he imagined.
No one really liked Fuad. He whined, he begged, and he couldn’t carry out the simplest tasks without finding humiliating new ways to screw up. Still, his reputation was that he was a pitiful guy but basically harmless. I never would’ve believed him clever enough to scam me for twenty-four-hundred kiam, yet he had. I couldn’t let him get away with that, of course, but I could afford to be patient enough to work out a satisfying counter-sting.
Friedlander Bey, my great-grandfather and the most powerful man in the city, hears of everything that happens. I hear almost everything, because I’m Papa’s trusted right-hand man and because a lot gets said in my nightclub when the liquor’s flowing.
It was a little after two o’clock in the afternoon, about eight hours before the party was due to begin. I was sitting in my usual spot at the bar, where it curved in the back. Chiriga had thrown together my first white death of the day — gin, bingara, and a little Rose’s lime juice. I had a chipzine plugged into one of my two corymbic implants, and I was hearing a speech by the new amir of Mauretania, the country where I’d been born. As for all the seminaked women, sexchanges, and debs in the club, they were no distraction. After the first hundred thousand twirling tassels, the industry begins to lose some of its raw fascination.
The lovely young Yasmin sat beside me, sipping peppermint schnapps. She was a gorgeous, black-haired sexchange with whom I’d been having an on-again, off-again affair for the last few years. I was glad to have her back working for me. She put down her glass and stretched her lithe body. “Never guess what I heard,” she said, yawning.
Yasmin hears almost as much gossip as I do, but her problem is she believes all of it. I reached up and popped out my chipzine. “You heard that they’re going to build a replica of the Budayeen out in the desert so the tourists won’t bother us local residents around here.”
Yasmin’s dark eyes grew larger. “No! Are they? For real?”
“Forget it, Yasmin, I just made that up. What did you hear?”
She lifted her peppermint schnapps again and sucked up the rest of it noisily through a straw. “Fuad, that’s what.”
I raised my eyebrows. “What about Fuad?”