The hungry bitch's arrival in his life marked a distinct upturn in Zelim's fortunes. A few hours later he came into a village many times larger than Atva, where he found a large crowd in the midst of what he took to be some kind of celebration. The streets were thronged with people shouting and stamping, and generally having a fine time.
"Is it a holy day?" Zelim asked a youth who was sitting on a doorstep, drinking.
The fellow laughed. "No," he said, "it's not a holy day."
"Well then why's everybody so happy?"
"We're going to have some hangings," the youth replied,, with a lazy grin.
"Oh… I… see."
"You want to come and watch?"
"Not particularly."
"We might get ourselves something to eat," the youth said. "And you look as though you need it." He glanced Zelim up and down. "In fact you look like you need a lot of things. Some breeches, for one thing. What happened to you?"
"I don't want to talk about it."
"That bad, huh? Well then you should come to the hangings. My father already went, because he said it's good to see people who are more unfortunate than you. It's good for the soul, he said. Makes you thankful."
Zelim saw the wisdom in this, so he and his dog accompanied the boy through the village to the market square. It took them longer to dig through the crowd than his guide had anticipated, however, and by the time they got there all but one of the men who were being hanged was already dangling from the makeshift gallows. He knew all the prisoners instantly: the ragged beards, the sunburned pates. These were his violators. All of them had plainly suffered horribly before the noose had taken their lives. Three of them were missing their hands; one of them had been blinded; others, to judge by the blood that glued their clothes to their groins, had lost their manhoods to the knife.
One of this unmanned number was Nazar, the leader of the gang, who was the last of the gang left alive. He could not stand, so two of the villagers were holding him up while a third slipped the noose over his head. His rotted teeth had been smashed out, and his whole body covered with cuts and bruises. The crowd was wildly happy at the sight of the man's agonies. With every twitch and gasp they applauded and yelled his crimes at him. "Murderer!" they yelled. "Thief!" they yelled. "Sodomite!" they yelled.
"He's all that and more, my father says," the youth told Zelim. "He's so evil, my father says, that when he dies we might see the Devil come up onto the gallows and catch his soul as it comes out of his mouth!"
Zelim shuddered, sickened at the thought. If the boy's father was right, and the sodomite robber-monk had been the spawn of Satan, then perhaps that unholiness had been passed into his own body, along with the man's spittle and seed. Oh, the horror of that thought; that he was somehow the wife of this terrible man and would be dragged down into the same infernal place when his time came.
The noose was now about Nazar's neck, and the rope pulled tight enough that he was pulled up like a puppet. The men who'd been supporting him stood away, so that they could help haul on the rope. But in the moments before the rope tightened about his windpipe, Nazar started to speak. No; not speak; shout, using every last particle of strength in his battered body.
"God shits on you all!" he yelled. The crowd hurled abuse at him. Some threw stones. If he felt them breaking his bones, he didn't respond. He just kept shouting. "He put a thousand innocent souls into our hands! He didn't care what we did to them! So you can do whatever you want to me-"
The rope was tightening around his throat as the men hauled on the other end. Nazar was pulled up on to tip-toe. And still he shouted, blood and spittle coming with the words.
"-there is no hell! There is no paradise! There is no-"
He got no further; the noose closed off his windpipe and he was hauled into the air. But Zelim knew what word had been left unsaid. God. The monk had been about to cry: there is no God.
The crowd was in ecstasies all around him; cheering and jeering and spitting at the hanged man as he jerked around on the end of the rope. His agonies didn't last long. His tortured body gave out after a very short time, much to the crowd's disapproval, and he hung from the rope as though the grace of life had never touched him. The boy at Zelim's side was plainly disappointed.
"I didn't see Satan, did you?"
Zelim shook his head, but in his heart he thought: maybe
I did. Maybe the Devil's just a man like me. Maybe he's many men; all men, maybe.
His gaze went along the row of hanged men, looking for the one who had prayed while he'd been raped; the one Zelim suspected had left him the wine, bread, and fruit. Perhaps he'd also persuaded his companions to spare their victim; Zelim would never know. But here was the strange thing. In death, the men all looked the same to him. What had made each man particular seemed to have drained away, leaving their faces deserted, like houses whose owners had departed, taking every sign of particularity with them. He couldn't tell which of them had prayed on the rock, or which had been particularly vicious in their dealings with him. Which had bitten him like an animal; which had pissed in his face to wake him when he'd almost fainted away; which had called him by the name of a woman as they'd ploughed him. In the end, they were virtually indistinguishable as they swung there.
"Now they'll be cut up and their heads put on spikes," the youth was explaining, "as a warning to bandits."
"And holy men," Zelim said.
"They weren't holy men," the youth replied.
His remark was overheard by a woman close by. "Oh yes they were," she said. "The leader, Nazar, had been a monk in Samarkand. He studied some books he should never have studied, and that was why he became what he became."
"What kind of books?" Zelim asked her.
She gave him a fearful look. "It's better we don't know," she said.
"Well I'm going to find my father," the youth said to Zelim. "I hope things go well with you. God be merciful."
"And to you," Zelim said.
Zelim had seen enough; more than enough, in truth. The crowd was working itself up into a fresh fever as the bodies were being taken down in preparation for their beheading; children were being lifted up onto their parents' shoulders so they could see the deed done. Zelim found the whole spectacle disgusting. Turning away from the scene, he bent down, picked up his flea-bitten dog, and started to make his way to the edge of the assembly.
As he went he heard somebody say: "Are you sickened at the sight of blood?"
He glanced over his shoulder. It was the woman who'd spoken of the unholy books in Samarkand.
"No, I'm not sickened," Zelim said sourly, thinking the woman was impugning his manhood. "I'm just bored. They're dead. They can't suffer any more."
"You're right," the woman said with a shrug. She was dressed, Zelim saw, in widow's clothes, even though she was still young; no more than a year or two older than he. "It's only us who suffer," the woman went on. "Only us who are left alive."
He understood absolutely the truth in what she was saying, in a way that he could not have understood before his terrible adventure on the road. That much at least the monks had given him: a comprehension of somebody else's despair.
"I used to think there were reasons…" he said softly.
The crowd was roaring. He glanced back over his shoulder. A head was being held high, blood running from it, glittering in the bright sun.
"What did you say?" the woman asked him, moving closer to hear him better over the noise.