That is not to say there hasn’t been a deal of noisy rejoicing over Farzad’s return. But now Bianca, Rose, Ned and Timothy are sitting in appalled silence while Farzad tells them the story of Aži Dahāka – the cruellest man in the world.
‘I call him this name after a bad spirit that lived in Persia in the time of my ancestors,’ Farzad explains as the embers crackle in the hearth. ‘The old Aži Dahāka had three heads and could burn whole villages with his fiery breath. But I must tell you of the new Aži Dahāka. He has only one head. But I think the Devil dwells inside it.’
It is not easy to tell a tale of suffering and death beneath a blazing sun, when you’re in a darkened English tavern on a chilly April evening. But Farzad tries his best, even though it is a story he is fearful of raising from the place, deep in his soul, where he has tried so hard to bury it.
It is a hot Arabian day some three years past, he begins. A round score of his extended family is making the Hajj pilgrimage, a requirement of their faith. They have pooled their resources to pay for a dhow to take them across the water to Al-Qatif, where they will embark on the long trek across the desert to Mecca. It is early afternoon on the second day at sea and the deck of the dhow is too hot to walk on barefoot. Below is even worse: a fetid dark dungeon where the air is so thick it is like trying to breathe through hot pitch. None of them have been to sea before, and the women – especially his grandmother Abijah – are suffering greatly. Grandma Abijah is becoming delirious. Only the soothing hand of Farzad’s younger sister, Sabra, on her brow can calm her. Sabra – or so his father always says – can calm a hurricano.
But despite the discomfort, the rest of the party are otherwise in good spirits. The pilgrimage will be hard – they know it. But they will return in a state of grace. And if any should fall along the way, although those left behind will weep, they will be happy, because the departed soul will be guaranteed entry to heaven.
It is Farzad’s cousin, Ramin, who first catches a glimpse of a triangular lateen sail shimmering like a shark’s fin against the skyline – a corsair caravel, her canvas swollen with wind, twenty oars a side. And she is coming on like an arrow fired from a bow.
‘They mean us no ill,’ Farzad’s uncle, Hassan, says. ‘When they see that we are pilgrims, they will let us go on our way.’
But Farzad has already seen the fear in his father’s eyes.
And he is right to be afraid. The corsairs turn out to be a band of godless brigands from Khor Fakkan. They swarm over the dhow like ants over a carcass. And they care not a fig for pious pilgrims. They see them only as booty.
The captain of this pack of dogs is a tall, princely man the corsair crew call Tafilalt. This is not his true name, as Farzad will later learn, but the name of the distant desert region from which he hails.
Tafilalt is taller than any man Farzad had yet seen. He carries himself like a prince, his chiselled face lined with wheals of raised skin, as though Allāh – the most merciful, the most compassionate – has stitched him together out of hide left too long in the sun. He does not walk like an ordinary man. He appears to glide as though transported by magic, for Farzad can see no sign of feet between the white robe that he wears and the reflected brilliance of the sun bouncing off the deck planks.
Tafilalt, Farzad quickly comes to realize, is a very bad man indeed. Pity is alien to him. He tells his captives that he has not been born of a woman, but of a stone in the desert. And in this spirit, he announces that they must forget all that has happened in their lives till now: childhood, siblings, parents, marriage, children… everything. If they do not forget, then memory will soon become a torment to them instead of a comfort. From this point on, memories – however cherished – are better cast into the sea and left to sink. They should consider themselves born anew.
They are to be landed at the port of Suakin, on the Red Sea. There they will join a slaver caravan for the long walk across the desert to the western edge of the world – and the fabled slave markets of Marrakech, Tripoli and Algiers. Of those who survive the march, the fittest men will be sold for galley slaves, the less hardy castrated and sent to work as house slaves. As for the women, the young will go for concubines, the older for nursemaids. To prepare them for this enticing destiny, they must each develop a hard outer skin of endurance.
Tafilalt does not expect them to accomplish this by themselves. They will be educated by a man who has taught Tafilalt himself all he knows about piracy.
It is now that Farzad learns that Tafilalt is not the worst man on the ship. Not by a long way.
To his utter bewilderment – because he has never yet met a Christian – the man who is to instruct them all in this new hardiness is not of Tafilalt’s race. Not even of his religion. He is an infidel. A man who has come from a distant land to make his living netting human souls from the sea, the way the fishermen at Bandar Siraf haul up the gleaming silver hamour. He is a walking white cadaver with a salt-scoured face and wild eyes. Aži Dahāka in human form. The cruellest man on earth. The corsairs call him Conn-ell.
First, this Conn-ell has the pilgrims – young and old alike – clapped in ankle-chains. Then he forces them to squat for hours in the prow of the ship beneath the blazing sun, without water. Those who cannot bear it he chastises, with whispering slashes of a cane. Slashes that begin with the tip pointing accusingly at heaven, and that end with it smacking hard against the deck on the down-stroke.
Grandmother Abijah is the first to lose her mind. Even Sabra’s soothing words cannot calm her. So Conn-ell orders the pins removed from her irons and has her thrown into the warm waters off Kish Island, to take her rest as best she might find it.
At this, his sister begins a great and terrible wailing, even though the air is so hot it burns the mouth like melted sugar. Even Tafilalt comes over from his wooden throne on the stern to see what the commotion is about. The wailing only ceases when Sabra too joins Grandma Abijah at her rest.
It takes fourteen days to reach the Bab-el-Mandeb, the stretch of water that marks the entrance to the Red Sea. It is known in Farzad’s own language as the Gate of Tears. It is aptly named. By the time they reach it, his cousin Ramin, three aunts and his uncle Hassan have also been cast into the sea because they failed to grow this calloused skin of endurance that Aži Dahāka, the cruellest man in all this world, demands of them.
During that grim fortnight three other vessels are run down and taken: two traders from Manora in Sindh, across the Arabian Sea, and a Christian ship carrying Portuguese merchants. All who survive capture – and more than a few prefer to die, resisting – are inducted into Aži Dahāka’s madrasa, the school of endurance.
For Tafilalt, this is proving a prosperous cruise. Consequently there are few provisions left aboard to feed and water his own crew, let alone forty or so captives. But he has thought ahead. At the Gate of Tears, two other corsair caravels are waiting. And thus it is that Farzad, his father, two uncles and a nephew are transferred with five Portuguese Christians to another vessel.
But the Bab-el-Mandeb can be capricious. The next day a sudden and violent squall separates the little armada. Separated from the others, Farzad’s ship is swamped by the heavy seas and abandoned by the survivors among her crew. The only living soul left aboard is Farzad.
With her stern barely above water, she drifts on the current for two more days. To keep out of the sun, Farzad crawls through a hatch into a tiny, steeply tilting space that the water has not reached. And there he stays, his feet against a deck brace, emerging only when the sun slips below the horizon.