How protective are manners and robes in normal society! How easily we forget, with these thin screens between us, not only the grosser parts of one another’s nature, but even that flesh and pulse are there. The mere hang-—with hardly the flexibility for a pleat or the ruffle from a breeze—of the Grand Vizier’s rich, heavy fabrics had made him seem impervious. But the assassin’s knife cut through the brocade like gauze and the life blood spilled from Sokolli Pasha as if he were no more than one of the hundred common goats the palace butchers dispatch every day.
The assassin gave a wild shout of triumph, but there was some foreign accent on his Turkish so his battle cry did not carry far or bear much weight. I left it to others to constrain him: His deed was suicidal; he did not even attempt to escape. I pushed by him to ease my master’s crumple to the ground.
Although too weak to pull it from the scabbard, his right hand still convulsed about the hilt of his own sword. But when I took his left in mine, he let the weapon go in order to grasp my hand in both of his. He smiled at me—like a lover, I thought, when his love had been fulfilled and spent. And though others around will testify his last word was a pious “Allah,” I, who was closer, heard my own name, “Abdullah.”
I saw him shrink as the life went from him and that which had been truly great dissipated into other realms. Then I was grateful for the forms of religion that diverted the wildness of my grief into a quiet recitation of the Koran’s first Sura. I said it, trying to match the very tones Sokolli had used the night before when he had prayed for what he had now received: a martyr’s end.
XLVIII
Never have I appreciated more the haste with which mortal remains are disposed of in Islam. Sokolli’s body was never brought back into our house. Only professional wailers were, so death remained a pure and abstract thing, full of glory and myth to the inmates. I stayed with the body, however, from the Second Court to the graveyard, heedless of impurity. Also, because this transfer happened so quickly, I was able to keep my detached blur of confusion and disbelief. There was never time for horror and revulsion to seize a stranglehold upon my soul.
In spite of the haste, the word—like all news in the city—spread faster than runners could have carried it. By the time the body was washed and ready to leave the mosque, the processional way was thronged with mourners. Every man sought to take his five or six steps beneath the bier and pressed out of his way others who came between him and the honor. I, too, worked my way to touch the wooden slats, the scrap of white linen showing through. Again and again I attained the relic, though I never felt it have any weight—miraculously, though the miracle is probably explained by the numbers sharing the burden.
The narcotic effect of all this reverence carried me right to the interment. In the cemetery, all the other stones, with the decomposition and sink of soil beneath them, seemed to tilt at angles in obeisance towards the newly turned earth. I had more the impression of rites of pilgrimage at some holy shrine than those of eternal parting.
It was not until the next day in the First Court of the palace again that the myth faded and the reality of grief and lust for vengeance overcame me. I found myself suddenly face-to-face with the assassin.
His punishment had been swift and summary, and now his detached head sat in a little niche at just the height it would have been had it still been supported by a body. This display was meant as a lesson in the awesome justice of the Porte to any others who contemplated similar deeds. It was clearly a lesson in why rapid burial was called for if any sanctity was to remain in the memory of a man. Already the face was sagging with corruption and was clearly well on its way to becoming of the same consistency and revulsion as dog’s feces in the swelter of a summer’s day.
I had not studied the man closely before. Now I saw—beneath the blood and dirt that bruised his face but turned his dirt-grey cap a royal shade—a face of average appearance. The executioner’s blade had neatly cut through a tendency he had to double chins, leaving only a fantasy sight of blackening blood and butcher-shop muscle exposed. He had average black brows, an average mustache, a nose only slightly larger and rounder than the mean. The best distinguishing feature I could see, then, was a round, pudgy chin protruding from a beard only four or five days old (grown as a disguise, perhaps?) pierced dead center by a dimple. His lips, rotting in a bizarre sneer (it wasn’t difficult to see what shape they must have had when plans of murder were hissed) exposed one black gap where an incisor was missing.
Who was this man and what were his motives. He must have known his deed was suicide, still it had been worth that price to him. What terrible grudge did he bear my master? A grudge born of ignorance, for surely Sokolli Pasha never knowingly caused it. That rag of a cap still declared him a dervish. But was he indeed? Was that merely a disguise (the few day’s beard another clue) that had been adopted with the knowledge that few would suspect or hinder him in such dress?
I questioned the nearby guards, but in their haste to send the assassin
