Imaswan looked at him in astonishment, and the members of the council gazed at him with even greater surprise. Meanwhile, Aghulli was smiling secretly and enigmatically while his fingers fiddled with the diss mat. Finally, Imaswan spoke. “You should have attempted to sway them rather than deliver their heresy to our ears.”
“My comrade can try to sway them, because they’ve come to tell you today exactly what they told me yesterday.”
Silence reigned over the oblation chamber. Outside, the people’s clamor grew louder. Imaswan asked, “Do you really want me to go out to them?”
“If you don’t, we’ll be forced to choose someone who will act for you and all the rest of us.”
“I’ve never been good at public speaking.”
“You’ve never been at a loss for an argument. You’ve never lacked eloquence.”
“But, my voice. …”
“We’ll call the herald. I’ve sent someone to search for him.”
“I see you’ve thought of everything.”
“I consider this the lesser evil than civil strife consuming the oasis.”
“Civil strife?”
“It would be wrong to underestimate the common people. It’s said they’re like children before a sage and like an inferno before a fool.”
The seated man pressed the diss mat with his palms to control his emotions and cast a sweeping glance round the council as if asking for help from its members. The hero gestured to him encouragingly, but Imaswan Wandarran looked off in another direction and addressed the venerable elder with words that blended earnestness and jest. “Have you heard, master? They’re set on replacing eternity’s leader with the fool’s leader. Does our master find any point to their bickering?”
The venerable elder’s eyes narrowed till the whites were no longer visible. He swayed like someone overcome by a catastrophe. He keened his everlasting lament, “Hi-y-y-yeh!”
At the chamber door, a powerful man wearing a black turban peered in. The sleeves of his gray tunic were hiked to his shoulders, revealing arms that were also gray and were sculpted with bulging muscles that twisted like the roots of some trees. He crossed his arms at his waist prior to announcing: “The herald awaits permission to enter.”
4
In the circular plaza that surrounded the sanctuary on all four sides, citizens crowded together. Even though the area appeared packed, the adjoining alleys continued to spew forth new folks who had banded together in small knots or encountered each other as individuals on the streets. They bumped turbans at times to whisper to each other about the conduct of the conspirators and then shrank back to argue loudly with one another.
Even though their voices created a fearsome growl unprecedented in the oasis, the voices in the area near the eastern walls of the temple were more daring than all the others and became a veritable, detestable cacophony.
The sun was heading toward its zenith.
The members of the council left the chamber and lined up parallel to the wall, with Imaswan Wandarran at the center. To his left stood Aghulli. The hero stationed himself on his right, thrusting his mythic spear into the earth beside him. He had drawn his sword, about which female poets had recited so many poems that people deemed it a legendary artifact from the ancients’ myths.
The slaves bearing the palm-branch litter appeared, and Aghulli stepped to the left to make room beside Imaswan Wandarran for the venerable elder.
A sudden silence seized the plaza.
The silence evolved into a stillness the tribe had only experienced in the desert.
It was a stillness people had forgotten since they erected buildings, settled inside houses and walls, and surrounded those walls with barricades and fences, welcoming within these redoubts caravans, foreigners, and wayfarers.
They enjoyed the silence and delighted in listening to the stillness, hearing spiritual songs that are audible only when the world is still. The silence, however, terrifies people who have never known solitude and never savored the taste of stillness in the desert. The quiet frightened the crowds, because from eternity it has been hostile to anyone who has lost his psychological bearings. Man flees to seek refuge among crowds, because he cannot bear the stillness. He could not bear the stillness now either. So he fidgeted, whispered, and muttered.
The mumbling grew louder. Then the venerable elder responded with his refrain, which he had borrowed from the dictionary of eternity, “Hi-y-y-yeh.”
Imaswan considered this cry a good omen and seized the opportunity to speak, “I have heard … the council has heard that the inhabitants of the oasis intend to reject the oasis’s master who rests in the tomb to replace him with a wretched puppet chosen from earthly people’s puppets.”
The herald sprang into the gap between the crowd of people and the row of noblemen. He called out in a resonant voice that seemed to outstrip his compact body: “I have heard … the council has heard that the inhabitants of the oasis intend to reject the oasis’s master who rests in the tomb to replace him with a wretched puppet chosen from earthly people’s puppets.”
A row erupted in the throngs. Angry and disgusted shouts rang out. People at the rear brazenly brandished fists threateningly in the air.
Somewhere in the front lines a voice was raised, “They call the earthly leader a puppet. We call the comatose leader a corpse.”
Other voices repeated this statement as if seconding the appeal and making fun of the herald, who had repeated the nobleman’s words. “They call the earthly leader a puppet. We call the comatose leader a corpse.”
The noblemen’s scion tightened the veil around his face and pulled it higher till it covered his nose. He lowered the upper portion until it shielded his eyes. The other noblemen perceived that he was hiding his perplexity, since they knew that this glorious scarf was designed to ward off anguish and to succor veiled nations during confrontations. The scion of the nobles was still for a longer time than protocol allowed. So the hero secretly nudged him with his elbow.
Without uncovering his face or eyes, Imaswan asked, “Don’t you know that renouncing the leader’s Law entails renunciation of the prophecy?”
The herald leapt forward once more and, clapping his hands over his ears, chanted this query so melodiously that his performance stirred their admiration.
Then silence dominated the area.
The stillness did not last long.
Soon the same voice burst forth again from somewhere in the front row, “Let the dead supervise the affairs of the dead. Bring us a leader from among you.”
The throngs snatched up this phase and repeated the call, roaring in unison. The appeal was reiterated with spontaneous emotion even though it seemed once more an ignoble jest intended to poke fun at the herald’s craft.
Imaswan shouted desperately, “If you’ve decided to renounce the Law today, don’t blame us if the heavens renounce you tomorrow.”
The herald clapped his hands over his ears again, directed his head toward the sun, tensed his muscles like a rooster, and repeated the speech, as if it were a beautiful chant full of poetry’s sweetness and a song’s melancholy.
At that moment, a wiry man sprang from the swarms in the front line. Wearing a striped djellaba, the man had wrapped the veil around his head in a ludicrous fashion. A piece of faded linen concealed the top part of his head, and another piece of the same color was wrapped around his lips, cheeks, and chin, without covering his protruding ears. This individual was not merely wiry, he was also short. When he spoke, the whole crowd recognized his voice as the one that had been challenging the nobles’ scion throughout the debate. He seemed to be addressing the herald and not the council of nobles, who were lined up against the wall. “You should understand that we have demonstrated a lot of confidence in you by asking you to choose a leader for us from among yourselves.”