Imaswan Wandarran turned toward his fellows and glanced absentmindedly at their faces in turn as if waiting for one of them to bring him an argument quickly or to take his side in the debate.
Finally he moved to confront his adversary with a painful question: “If what you say is true, then we treated our late comrade very unjustly.”
The man with two veils responded with a courage that the tribes were unaccustomed to hearing from the tongues of merchants: “Do you doubt that?”
“Are we murderers?”
“Do you doubt that?”
Imaswan looked at his mates’ faces in succession as if appealing for help, but their countenances were stern, mute, glum, expressionless masks, as if the jinn had replaced his friends and inserted creatures of their ilk into the council. He turned to confront the seated man again and stared at his face for a long time, as if seeing him for the first time.
In a peculiar tone he asked, “Do you remember the day when you surrounded us with proletarian armies who demanded that we leave the affairs of the dead to the dead and appoint the living to oversee the living?”
The chief merchant nodded his head yes but did not stop playing with the handful of pebbles in the palm of his left hand. So Imaswan resumed his questioning in the same tone: “I asked you then where you had come from, but you did not reply. Can you answer me today?”
The seated man looked up from his game inquisitively. Then Imaswan leaned toward him as if intending to butt him with his turbaned head. Staring at him provocatively, he asked, “Who are you? Who are you?”
The man with two veils shot him a proud, disparaging glance. Then he turned his attention back to the bits of rock. But Imaswan did not yield. With childish insistence he asked again, “Tell me: are you really one of the people of the wasteland or are you one of the people of the Spirit World?”
2
“If what you say about the sovereign is correct, how was our leader who sleeps in the neighboring tomb able to assume leadership one day with a finesse that hostile tribes acknowledged even before the tongues of the generations forwarded that praise — without being afflicted with the Spirit World’s lunacy, which you discussed?”
The council members backed Ah’llum with a murmur of approval while the hero thrust his hand into his pocket to pull out the dark scrap of cloth that he used to daub his eyes during anxious moments — on the advice of the herbalist, who had claimed that the fabric, which was saturated with blue dye, had a magical effect and could relieve pain temporarily from his eyes and over time would heal their underlying ailment.
The council had convened many times in the temple, and the members’ voices had been raised in dispute there. The sessions had been dissolved just as frequently, without the members reaching a consensus on a new governor. Neither the logic of the chief merchant nor the adage of this inscrutable man (whom they had found among them one day without knowing where he had come from or to which clan he belonged) disturbed them so much as their comrade Aggulli’s fate, which seemed to presage their own, should a thirst for sovereignty get the better of them and they aspire to become the ruler.
On this day, when they reconvened, they discovered for the first time that whispers and doubts had demoralized them. They listened apprehensively to each other and were wary about what was said, as one comrade looked at another with a cautious eye.
Before the man with two veils rushed to respond, the hero asked him for a slight clarification: “You should realize that I’m not discussing the characteristics of the leader of yesteryear to rehash the generation’s legends or to confirm the views of the masses, who did not know him. I said what I said, because the Spirit World rewarded me by making me a member of this noble council when I was young.”
The chief merchant glared at him malevolently. He toyed with the edge of his lower veil to mask his reaction before he responded to the question with a question: “Did you find in the late leader the traits of leadership during all the time you associated with him?”
“What do you mean to say?”
“Was the leader in the tomb a leader like all the others?”
“What do you want to say?”
“I am saying that the leader of eternity was a poet before he became a leader. The invisible jinni called ‘poetry’ in our language conquered in his chest the ghoul we call ‘leadership’ in our miserable language.”
“It is said that he recited charming poems in his youth, and I don’t deny that in my youth I recited couplets the tribe attributed to him. Everyone knows, however, that the Council of Wisdom stifled the gift in him because it thought poetry a game ill befitting a leader’s majesty. Similarly, on another day, it stifled in his chest his desire to marry the poet, because it thought that she too was a caprice inappropriate for the grandeur of the leader.”
“The sages stifled in his chest the poetry of the tongue, but his poetry flowed out in his deeds and traits.”
“Why not dam the flood head on? Why do you want to tire our heads with hard puzzles? Here, I’ll dam the flow and say that anyone who has settled in the Spirit World to become a poet doesn’t need to change and disguise himself from the world — unlike a worldly leader. The secret doesn’t lie in his being someone who lives only for play — as befits any ruler — but in his being someone who has known from the beginning that he will govern a wasteland in which he discovers the clearly visible face of the Spirit World.”
“Everyone who knew him will acknowledge that he never was playful.”
“Did you all spy on his heart too, the way you spied on him whenever he stood up or sat down, went or came?”
“Playfulness, like passionate love, cannot be concealed.”
“The wise way he ruled the tribe proves that he wasn’t merely playful but a cunning strategist too.”
“People who knew him never found him to be anything but a shining exemplar of earnestness and an icon of severity.”
“Severity flourishes only in the meadows of playfulness.”
“Here we return to riddles via the widest portal!”
“The playfulness to which we refer isn’t the sport of young minds, which is what the masses assume. It is, instead, a great secret no less significant than the Law itself.”
“….”
“If the question of playfulness were insignificant, people wouldn’t have cursed life and wouldn’t have found happiness to be harder to achieve than passing a camel’s neck through the eye of a needle.”
“Do you consider play really to be this difficult?”
“Play, like prophecy, is a heavenly firebrand. If it could be grasped by anyone hustling and bustling on earth, happiness would have been easy.”
“Amazing!”
“Our master, who slumbers nearby, didn’t go to the distant sanctuary to snatch the gift using the sovereignty of the intellect; he did that following the path of a possessed person who went to reclaim a bequest left to him by his ancestors.”