But….
But why look so far? Why would he need to hunt far away when the creature whose chastity was discussed in poems and whose conjugal faithfulness her female companions lauded did not live in the homelands of the ancient epics, but slept beside him? Wasn’t his wife the only creature whose chastity would never be doubted — not even by the dread Spirit World — after people’s tongues had spoken of it and crowned her head with chastity?
4
Man’s liquid caused the dispute between the sorceress and her neighbor. Ancient cautionary tales report that the sorceress heard her neighbor disparage the value of this liquid and call it polluted. So she scolded and cautioned her. But like any other chatterbox, this neighbor gave free rein to her tongue in women’s gatherings and thoroughly lambasted and slandered the magical liquid. It was said that she took great delight in vilifying it and spat in disgust whenever her girlfriends mentioned it. The sorceress’s patience with her neighbor was exhausted, and she decided to teach the fool a lesson that only a practitioner of sorcery can deliver. She wandered in the northern badlands by night and conversed with the heaven’s stars. Lovers tarrying in the wastelands heard her loud debate with jinn demons but did not fathom the reason for the dispute till some days later when ischuria afflicted her wretched neighbor, and this human liquid was retained by her haughty body.
She closeted herself in her tent, sent out for salves and macerated herbs, and swallowed juices prescribed by grannies. She drank chamomile tea for three days straight and swallowed wormwood elixir for the next three. Then she stewed colocynth fruit and drank the broth and also consumed the seeds, but the illness was not affected, and the human liquid was retained even more stubbornly by her body. The miserable woman was obliged to descend from her high horse and to send for the herbalist.
The herbalist drew many herbs from his satchel and gave her lots of liquids to drink, but her urine retention persisted. So the woman was burning with fever and began to struggle with bouts of insanity.
Finally the herbalist admitted he could not cure her — as every desert apothecary does when he realizes that a condition’s etiology is mysterious. He told the woman that herbalists were created to treat physical ills the wasteland spawns, but that wasteland inhabitants would be obliged to search for a cure for Spirit World illnesses from the masters of the Spirit World. Then the arrogant neighbor woman was forced to descend from her high horse a second time; she summoned the sorceress.
The sorceress entered her neighbor’s tent and was surprised to find there — instead of her neighbor — a specter … a shriveled, pale, unkempt female jinni, whose large, protruding eyeballs glowed with anxiety, pain, and insanity. In her pupils was that distressing sign seen only in the eyes of people whom time has afflicted with an unexpected calamity so that they find themselves standing before the house of destruction without ever yielding to an unknown destiny or believing that death might be so easy.
The sorceress stood by her longtime neighbor’s head and remarked, “What do you suppose a person in whom human liquid is retained will give if one day a person is found who can expel from the body poisoned by this pollution a single drop of the sacred liquid that purifies man from his defilements?”
The neighbor woman collapsed and howled at the top of her lungs. Wallowing in the dirt at the feet of the longtime sorceress, she begged, “A person suffering from urine retention will give everything her hand possesses to the person who can expel from her body a single drop of the one liquid that purifies man’s body from man’s defilement.”
“I am happy to hear a tongue describe man’s water as sacred today after I heard it accuse urine yesterday of all types of impurity.”
“Man, my lady, is a dull-witted child who does not realize that fire burns till it scorches his fingers.”
“Man won’t be wise, man won’t be happy, till he recognizes the contrary in its contrary.”
“It is pointless to think the haughty fellow will learn that before the day he receives a punishing lesson.”
“Isn’t it astonishing that you described man’s water yesterday as impure and today characterize it as sacred?”
“I would not have admitted that, my lady, if time had not taught me such a severe lesson.”
“Know, then, that man’s water is like a chameleon’s saliva, which is lethal poison for vipers but the strongest antidote for sorcery in man’s body.”
“I have heard that the chameleon overpowers the sorceries of foreigners.”
“The water that exits from the body is a secret like the chameleon’s saliva. It literally kills grass because it is a herbicide, but purifies bodies of their poisons.”
“No creature who exists in the desert could possibly believe my lady’s statement as fervently as the miserable wretch kneeling at your feet.”
“In man’s water resides man’s cure!”
“You’re right, my lady.”
“What is man’s water, which fools refer to as urine? Isn’t man’s water life itself?”
“Man’s water is life!”
5
He came to the temple escorted by two of his slaves, who seated him on the mat in the Chamber of Sacrificial Offerings. Then he ordered them to leave. Alone, he sat erect at the center of the chamber, scouting the stillness and fending off demons in the abyss of darkness. Even so, he did not hear the footsteps of the lady in the thawb.
He did not hear her footstep but did hear her voice. “I never expected to see the token of the disease still around the eyes of the hero of heroes after the prophecy.”
“How futile!”
“I am not disappointed about losing any hope of receiving a payment for the prophecy, because the wealth of diviners is not a gift from the physical world but a prophecy from the Spirit World. What has shaken me is a husband’s disillusionment with his wife’s chastity.”
He moaned expansively, and his fingers trembled violently. Slender fingers, which no longer resembled those that had earned him the title of hero, extended and slipped through the fuzz of the leather mat’s thick hair in an attempt to stifle his emotion and to mask the trembling of his fingers.
He spoke with the nobility of the last of the nobles. “Had it not been for my longstanding confidence in it, I would have doubted the truth of prophecy.”
“Is it right for a champion of the intellect to doubt the Spirit World and instead believe a woman’s word?”
“I admit, my lady, that this would be inappropriate. I acknowledge to my lady that this would be sheer stupidity. But what does a man have left when he is deceived by a wife whose nobility has been discussed by the tribes and whose chastity has been celebrated in extremely beautiful verses by poets?”
“The ultimate wisdom is not to believe a woman. The ultimate wisdom is never to trust a woman.”
“Was woman born to be an artiste?”
“All women are artistes. Woman is a born artiste.”
“Time has slung its catastrophes at me on three occasions in one span. The first was the day we elevated above us the Spirit World’s emissary, who stripped me of all my titles. The second was the day I imagined that one man could rescue another from an ailment, affliction, or any other loathsome condition and therefore accepted for my affliction medicine that blinded me and confined me to the abode of tenebrous darkness. Now time has struck me for a third time and stolen from my bedchamber a beloved whose chastity was proverbial among the tribes.”
“Catastrophes refuse to descend to the campsites singly.”