So could the Proxy come close to recreating the way Martin would have spent an hour in Zendegi with his son – answering all of Javeed’s questions, sharing all his jokes, vanquishing all his fears – and still not know, or care, precisely what it was itself?
Nasim had done her best, but the only way she’d know for sure on which side of the line she’d fallen would be to ask the Proxy, face to face.
23
‘Do you get along with birds?’ Shahin asked.
‘Of course!’ Javeed replied. ‘I even met the Simorgh once.’
‘The Simorgh?’ Shahin laughed. ‘Well then, an eagle shouldn’t trouble you one bit.’ He took a strip of leather from a small pail sitting on the ground beside him and wrapped it around Javeed’s right hand. ‘Hold your arm up, boy.’ Javeed complied. ‘A little higher,’ Shahin suggested. ‘I want to be sure he can see you way down there.’
Shahin whistled, and took a piece of rabbit meat out of a second, covered pail. Martin heard the swish of wings before he spotted the eagle approaching, descending from a nearby cypress tree. Javeed flinched slightly as the bird came closer; he turned his face aside, but he managed to keep his arm motionless. When the eagle alighted on his leather-bound fist, it found itself unable to wrap both feet at once around this tiny perch. Martin feared that it might sink its talons into the unprotected skin further up Javeed’s arm – and though his gut reaction was all about the nonexistent threat of pain and injury, the risk of the bird puncturing the illusion of its own physicality seemed real enough. But instead, it managed a kind of balancing act, shifting from one foot to another as it gobbled the rabbit flesh that Shahin dangled in front of it as a reward. Javeed wouldn’t feel its weight pushing his arm down, but the glove could probably manage a convincing impression of those four long, muscular toes clenching and unclenching.
They had come to the estate of King Kavus in the hope of accompanying him on his latest folly. Javeed loved all the stories of Kavus, and in the bowdlerised children’s version they were harmless enough, but Martin had baulked at exposing him to detailed immersive depictions of the king’s bloodthirsty military misadventures. Against the advice of Zal and countless others, Kavus had invaded Mazanderan, the land of demons and sorcerers, where his army had engaged in mass-slaughter – in the original, blithely hacking into unarmed men, women and children. The White Demon, protecting his land and people, had blinded Kavus and his soldiers and rounded them up as prisoners, whereupon Zal’s son, Rostam, had embarked on a quest to rescue the vain young king. This had involved slicing witches in half, pulling the ears off innocent bystanders and ultimately cutting out the White Demon’s liver and using his blood as a balm to restore Kavus’s sight.
Kavus’s repentance over the Mazanderan fiasco had proved to be shallow and insincere; he remained bloated with pride and immune to good counsel. But after scouring Zendegi’s catalogue of Shahnameh scenarios, Martin had finally found a Kavus story that was free of acts of evisceration, and he’d managed to talk Javeed into accepting it in lieu of the bloodier alternatives.
‘Now you feed him,’ Shahin told Javeed. ‘Reach behind your back and I’ll pass you the meat.’ Martin watched nervously as Javeed accepted a strip of raw pink flesh, holding it gingerly between his thumb and forefinger. He brought his arm in front of him and quickly raised the meat towards the bird, releasing his grip as it seized the flesh in its beak.
‘You’re doing well,’ Shahin said. ‘Now we’ll put the hood on.’
Javeed looked to Martin for support; Martin smiled encouragingly. Shahin handed Javeed the leather hood, showing him how to hold it stretched out across his fingers and bring it over the bird’s head without alarming or annoying it. The hood had an aperture for the beak and nostrils and was loose enough to cover the eyes without touching them, but Martin still found it extraordinary that birds of prey really could be trained to accept these strange encumbrances.
At Shahin’s prompting, Javeed crouched down and slowly moved his hand and its passenger towards the wicker cage that sat beside them. Despite its blindness, as it approached the open door the bird deduced what was happening; it gave an irritated shrug and made as if to spread its wings and take flight. Javeed emitted a startled grunt, but he kept his hand steady and after a moment the bird allowed him to continue.
Shahin said, ‘Touch your hand to the side of the perch.’ Javeed did this, and the bird felt its way onto the wooden perch inside the cage. Javeed withdrew his arm and closed the door.
‘Well done,’ Shahin said. ‘You’re a fast learner.’ He turned to Martin. ‘If you and the boy can get a dozen of the king’s eagles caged by noon, I’ll take you on as assistant handlers.’
Martin glanced at Javeed. ‘We’d better get to work then.’
The empty cages were stacked nearby. Armed with a pail of rabbit meat and Martin’s imitation of Shahin’s whistling, they strode through the cypress grove, trying to lure the birds down, taking turns to offer their clenched fists as perches. Martin knew that the game wouldn’t make their task impossible – no matter what the real outcome would have been if two inexperienced strangers had sought to round up someone else’s hunting birds! – but nor did it give them an entirely easy ride. The first two birds came to them without much trouble, but the third one they spotted ignored Martin’s whistling for three or four minutes, only to swoop down unexpectedly, knock over the meat pail and return to the trees with an unearned treat in its beak.
Javeed was undeterred; in less than a minute he’d located another bird, and this one turned out to be better behaved. When it landed on Martin’s fist it stared into his face, blinking and examining him curiously. Martin doubted that anyone had side-loaded a golden eagle, so its behaviour could only be surface-deep, but he couldn’t help feeling a degree of affinity for the creature. He was on his way from the biological sphere to the digital, and in his new home this counted as native life.
When the twelve cages were full, Shahin approached them with three burly helpers. ‘Good work! Now we need to get these quickly to the king’s pavilion. He’s determined to set out while the sun is high.’
Each of them carried two cages through the grove. Javeed gripped his pair by wrapping his hands around the bars at the side; the cages were too tall for him to lift them from above. Martin doubted that anyone, let alone a six-year-old, could have borne the torque on their wrists that would have come from trying to carry the cages this way, but Javeed was smart enough not to mistake a game in Zendegi for a lesson in correct load-handling techniques.
Shahin led the way to a grassy field where Kavus’s ‘pavilion’ stood waiting. Its base was a circular platform some fifteen metres wide, constructed from a lattice of woven fibres similar to those used to make the bird cages. In the centre was the royal tent; the fabric of its walls was lavishly embroidered in gold and violet, and the open flap revealed a plushly cushioned and similarly decorated throne.
Spaced around the platform, just in from the rim, were dozens of identical wooden rods, all vertical, standing about two metres tall. Near the base of each rod a length of rope lay coiled on the platform.
Martin and Javeed had not been the only ones busy in the grove; Shahin and the others had already gathered at least thirty eagles, and their cages stood on the ground to one side of the pavilion. Martin started laughing; he couldn’t help himself. A part of him simply couldn’t believe that Kavus’s deranged scheme would succeed for one second, even in Zendegi.
Javeed was annoyed. ‘Don’t, Baba!’ he whispered. ‘You’ll make everyone cross with us.’