3
A thin, grim man, who was veiled and cloaked in black, paced outside the diviner’s tent waiting for the dark to descend. He looked around him with the misgivings of someone who feared being caught red-handed. Then he penetrated the tent.
Inside he found the soothsayer leaning against the tent pole beside a dying fire and staring vacantly into a dark corner. He squatted near the hearth and tossed a handful of branches on the fire. Then he said, “I see that my master is still touring the land of forgetfulness.”
The diviner did not actually return from his fugue and continued to stare rigidly into the void of the dark corner as if unaware of the visitor’s presence.
But soon he returned to say, “How absurd it would be for someone who has explored the homeland of forgetfulness to settle for the lands of vanity or to savor lingering with people.”
“I have never known a creature who lauded forgetfulness with your enthusiasm.”
“How could a person who hasn’t experienced forgetfulness or known its advantages praise it?”
“Why should we experiment with it when we know we will experience it one day for the first and last time?”
“If you all tasted the sweetness of forgetfulness, you would want to live it today, not tomorrow.”
“May the Spirit World spare us this fate! We have children we need to care for till they grow up. We have livelihoods that we need to husband and develop. In the desert there are beautiful women and maidens we need to fondle and embrace on winter nights. So to whom should we leave all of this if we travel the road of forgetfulness before the appointed hour?”
“If you wish to escape from the manacles you just mentioned, then you shouldn’t worry about them, because throngs of idiots will instantly assume your responsibilities.”
“I fear, then, I would be the one deserving the epithet ‘idiot.’”
“I have a superior claim to idiocy than you, because I want to bring outside a person who has grown accustomed to life in the dark recesses of a cave. I want to convince him that light is more beautiful than darkness.”
“You’re right. Leave me in my murky gloom and repay me your debt. Then go to the Western Hammada and live out your forgetfulness to your heart’s desire.”
The diviner abandoned his immobility and turned toward his guest to ask, “You?”
The visitor responded calmly, “Did my master think he was still advancing through his distant wasteland and chatting with the ghostly shades of tombs in the Western Hammada?”
The diviner sat up straight and tried to discern the features of the stranger by the light of the tongues of the fire that had begun to spread and blaze. He said, “I thought you were a man who once came to this tent to bring me back from the land of forgetfulness — thinking he was doing me a favor.”
“The fact is, Master, that I didn’t do you a favor that day out of any love of doing good, because you know no one does good these days out of a love of doing good. That day I did it because I feared my debts would go unpaid.”
“What?” The soothsayer shouted this acerbic question twice.
His companion responded with a muffled laugh. He snickered for a long time before he asked, “Have you forgotten the debt or was the whole affair simply a strategy to escape paying? Was your supposed flight to the Western Hammada nothing but a flight to avoid repaying the debt?”
The diviner shouted in a threatening voice, “How dare you ridicule me? How dare you accuse me?”
“Hee, hee, hee. On my way to my master’s house I was wondering why people avoid paying their debts and decided to ask my master why enmity insinuates itself between the debtor and the creditor despite the fact that the intellect says that debt ought to build sturdy bridges of affection between them. Did my master speak to me about wisdom?”
He leaned forward till the end of his veil almost landed in the fire. He released into the face of the diviner a hateful laugh like the hiss of a serpent. Then he leaned back and watched the diviner with a malicious expression.
The diviner said, “The Spirit World knows that I made a good faith effort to repay the debt I owe you. Had the heavens not intervened and the drought, which destroyed my herds, descended, I would have repaid the debt a long time ago. Don’t think that a man can wash his hands of the burdens of the people of the wasteland merely by reaching the land of forgetfulness. In fact, liberation from the cares of the wasteland is the precondition for attaining forgetfulness. If I made the trip and was content to return after going half way, I only did that out of a desire to pay the debt. Had it not been for that desire, no antidote would have been able to bring me back to this earth.”
“Hee, hee … but my antidote returned you to our encampments, Master. Admit, Master, that my antidote is more potent than the forces of the Spirit World. Do you know why, Master? Because it’s an antidote that came to me from those encampments, because it is an antidote borrowed from the land of the Spirit World. Hee, hee, hee.”
The diviner was silent. He was silent for a long time. Finally he said, “In the past few days the tribe’s nobles have praised the one who returned me to them. I was thinking the reverse. I was telling myself that I would never forgive the specter who dragged me from the gardens of the Western Hammada to return me to the concerns of the world and the fetters of life in the tribe’s encampments. Now that I learn this specter wasn’t one of the shadows of the Spirit World, but a miserable man who merely wanted to retrieve a handful of gold dust, I see that I should punish him the way he has punished me. The only punishment I can think of is to refuse to repay the debt. This is your penalty!”
“What does my master mean to say?”
“Your punishment for your vile deed is not receiving your payment.”
“Does my master wish to turn affection into hatred pursuant to the law of the creditor and the debtor?”
“Defaulting on a loan is a mild punishment when gauged against your hateful deed!”
“Why are good deeds in this wasteland destined to be rewarded with ingratitude?”
“Get out or I’ll order you whipped!”
“You refuse to pay me and then order me whipped too?”
“Leave at once if you want to avoid falling into the hands of slaves with forearms stronger than iron chains!”
The guest leapt to his feet. Once outside he murmured a threat, as if uttering a prophecy to himself. “The desert has taught us to go and live in some earth other than the desert if we happen to acquire an enemy. Beware of living in the desert any longer, Crow of Misfortune!”
4
The tribe was destined to hear this prophecy again the day the diviner was slaughtered.
What happened was that the nobles’ debate about the sacrificial victim finally ended with an agreement to slaughter a black, male kid, because the exegesis adopted by the majority affirmed that “crow” did not refer to the physical bird; the secret was hidden, instead, in its color. The special attribute of the crow was not its conduct, gait, or other less obvious characteristics but its blackness, which was its principal distinction. So they selected a black goat kid and brought it to the diviner to sacrifice on the stones of the tomb.
The nobles circled round the temple mount, and children and curiosity seekers patrolled the empty area near the tent sites. Then one of the vassals brought the bound kid and placed it at the soothsayer’s feet. Busy reciting ancient talismans, he cast a vacant gaze at the naked sky. Then from his sleeve he brought out the bronze dagger and removed it from the scabbard. He bent over the sacrificial offering, and the goat bleated as loudly as it could. Then the diviner gestured to one of the vassals to come help him. The man put his knee on the goat’s neck and clung to its throat with both hands. So the soothsayer drew the greedy blade across the neck vein, and blood spouted copiously from the throat. It spattered and soiled the stones of the wall. The diviner withdrew his dagger and wiped the blood from it on the hair of the slaughtered goat. Then he sank the blade into the dirt near the blood offering’s head.