Colin MacWhirter 1216 words 3644 av du Musée #21 ©2001 Colin MacWhirter Montréal, Québec Canada H3G 2C9 514-288-9135

Algol by Colin MacWhirter

I know not whether my native land be a grazing ground for wild beasts or yet my home!

~ anonymous poet of Ma‘arra, c.1100

The people shun me... and I cannot live amongst them. I am cast out. I am the untouchable and the unspeakable. When in their cities, filled with people, still I am alone; I am always in the wilderness. They do not speak to me, nor I to them, yet they have a name for me, which is Ghul; sometimes I reckon they refer to me when they say, al-Gol, the Destruction, so when they peer upwards into the night sky they see my eye look back down at them, the baleful eye, portentious star. They believe me to be a temptress, using disguise to lure unsuspecting travellers to their doom. They believe me to have a particular taste for children. They believe me to be a shape-shifter, yet always to have cloven feet. I don’t mind them their superstitions because they do not know my nature. I don’t even have gender. But they cannot confront that which they dread: in the shadows, that which lives on the edge of their lives, which eats their flesh. The people divide and devise baseless differences amongst themselves (it is not enough for them that some are fast, some slow; but they must always invent new divisions: so that some eat more, some less). One faction turns on the other. It is not I who destroy, it is they... and I consume and thereby remove the debris. I believe they tend, at times, to emulate my example; but theirs is a crude imitation, they prey upon their own living, by exploiting others, which is more shocking – some few sucking the breath from others.

I have left one land of prophets for another. I have come from the East to the edge of a great sea; some mornings the fog rises from it over the sands; the people’s voices become subdued; because in the mist they can be more easily heard, they are shier. It is that kind of quiet on this morning. Mingled with the smells of their cooking fires and their morning tea and bread, their voices today are nervous, talking of the invaders, the people from the West, the Franj. The Franj have taken the city of Antioch and now no one can oppose them. The Franj have come to liberate and civilise the Holy Land. Here, only three days’ journey from Antioch, in the city of Ma‘arra, I can see some people are packing up food and clothes, their bedding and other belongings. They are fleeing to Aleppo, to Hama and to Homs, anywhere secure, to be anywhere but here – here, where those who cannot or will not go await the inevitable attack by the invaders. Those who flee will be beyond my reach. It doesn’t matter. Because I am waiting for the Franj to come and I will have much to feed upon. It will be like the clans of Persians, Seljuks, whose bones, even, I did not leave, in my Eastern past when I followed them Westward... when I feasted upon the remains of sieges, battles, assassinations, diseases,... I don’t know what, exactly, and I do not care. Earlier, I hung upon the Persian followers of Zoroaster. In their Towers of Silence, under the wings of carrion birds I released the souls of the dead in consuming them. And the white-robed ministers of the dead would remove and discard the chalk-bones, and I would eat those also. Nothing remained. Sometimes I heard the weeping of people left behind. In the trek across bitter, dry Persia some would fall, and I upon them, with my circles of vultures, legions of insects, flights of flies, glues of microbes devouring for me the body of the infirm straggler. Yet, each time, I found horror rise, sorrow rise in me for this once-human. I, who had followed them for weeks, knew every person. Knew them by smell. Knew them better than their fellows. Gnawing this arm, this cheek, I could only think of the mind which had sojourned there. What they do not know is that I live under a curse – that I must know each of them whom I must feed upon.

Now the Franj encircle the walled city, but after two weeks of inexperienced resistance the citizens lose heart. Ladders are raised and the soldiers climb over and into the city and think, ‘where shall I begin?’ Bohemond, leader of the Franj, promises to spare the lives of the people of Ma‘arra. But I can taste what is to come. There are three days of search and destroy: cellars are excavated and attics checked; when they are found, people are skewered, some held prisoner.

The Franj warm themselves by their campfires in the desert night, their prisoners wondering what is to become of them. How are they to be ransomed? In a letter to the pope, the following year, the Franj will explain, “a terrible famine wracked the army in Ma‘arra.” In the city, almost undetected, I begin to eat the bodies of those few who had guarded the walls and the nobles’ houses, who had been cut down by the Westerners. But beyond the city walls the Franj fires rise to the stars. They say grace unto their god. They have eaten their own horses near Antioch, eaten grass and leaves. Now, even with the granaries of Syria and Palestine before them, like a table set...

For three weeks smoke smears and obscures any light; the invaders’ encampments crackle with concealed activity. Sounds and movements pierce the veiled atmosphere unpredictably, startlingly. Every night, Franj voices rise up to Ma‘arra, “Are there no fat citizens in your town?! No matter. The thin will make good stock. None of you shall go to waste!” Every night, a few are taken. And the prisoners are bound like roasts and plopped into the cooking-pots, the children spitted and grilled. I am left with nothing. Nothing has prepared me for these Franj. Even I hardly know the flavour of cooked flesh. And what has been cooked leaves less to be eaten. Yet the Franj go on for weeks until, one night, roaming the streets with torches, they set alight the houses, the city walls already having been disassembled stone by stone. Later, Albert of Aix will record: “not only did our troops not shrink from eating dead Turks and Saracens, they also ate dogs!” There is nothing left for me. The remaining Syrian amirs, hoping to placate them, send gifts to the Franj and give them leave to march on. And now in Jerusalem I await the ages, meanwhile snacking upon the unfortunate poor, who – having sought shelter in the woods and braving lions, wolves, bears and hyenas – succumb to the cold, hunger, accident. Nothing will ever be the same. The Arabs and Turks, from this point on, will call the Westerners, ‘the Franj’, remembering ‘the anthropophages’. And the Franj, the Europeans, centuries later, having internalised the invaluable lesson that the Madman always gains from the terror he instills in others, will conveniently forget having stolen my sustenance, and subdue again and again the people by the sea in many a ‘civilising mission’.

The End