Ibrahim al-Koni - The Scarecrow

The miserable silence that followed reigned for a long time. The leader, who stood facing the group, clasped his hands behind his back and paced east and west, bent forward, as if searching for some bonanza or treasure on the ground. He was starting to speak again when a voice, which erupted from the crowd of noblemen, stopped him. “Did our master ask our opinion on the day he decreed civil strife and raided tribes near and far to snatch women? Did our master assume that a man could lie contentedly in the arms of a woman he had abducted with a sword’s blade? Doesn’t our master realize that a man who kidnaps a woman by force of arms is a murderer, even if destiny is slow to catch up with him and allows him to live a hundred years?”

A soldier rushed to silence the man forcibly, but the leader gestured sternly for him to desist. When he took two steps toward the assembly, he spotted in the midst of the tribe’s elders a thin, scrawny, mature man who was turbaned with a faded veil and who clutched a burnished cane in his trembling hand.

He did not wait for the leader’s response. Instead he added in the same daring voice, “We all know, master, that woman is a creature devoid of utility. She not only lacks utility but is actually injurious. Although we know this, we cannot keep ourselves from vying to acquire her. So we value her more than whatever is most precious in the desert and even consider her the crown of all the desert’s treasures. Therefore, intellectuals know that kidnapping women by force is a reckless adventure and an enormous danger. The total idiot who commits this offense wouldn’t have dared to embark on this madness had he realized that he was condemning himself to destruction. When he is not destroyed by the hand of her husband — if he survives — he is done in by the hand of comrades who pledge their fealty to him although their real goal is his treasure: the woman. When he is not destroyed by the malevolent conspiracies of these men, he is done in by the hand of the woman herself. This mysterious creature, whose secret no man has grasped, will surely poison his food one day, because a woman never forgives a man who abducts her from her father’s house — not even if she was abducted with her father’s consent. She will continue to harbor rancor and will scout for opportunities for revenge to the final day of her life. The man will never escape her rancor, no matter how many children he fathers for her. He won’t escape from her ill will, not even if he grants her ten children from his loins.”

This mature man fell silent, and the courtyard was still. The vassals and guards discerned in their lord’s eyes a dread shadow, a sign that frightened everyone and afflicted their souls with despair. It was weakness!

The leader unclasped his hands only to clasp them behind his back again. He was going to speak, but one of the notables rushed forward to address the strategist derisively: “I wager that the cunning foreign strategist entrusted that jinni woman to our master’s custody precisely because he knew our master is of jinni heritage!”

A noisy muttering spread through the assembled crowd, and the vassals glanced back and forth between the two adversaries with confusion and astonishment.

The sorcerer smiled with the forbearance of the ancient sages. So his interlocutor found the courage to add, “It is said that only a sorcerer can decipher a sorcerer’s talisman. The day the Spirit World brought you forth from the innards of your eerie scarecrow, we didn’t imagine that you would incite the rabble against us, ruin us with your taxes, or shed the blood of the elite while allowing the proletariat to conquer the earth. Today, when the specter of punishment looms on the horizon, you send lackeys to summon us to the consultative assembly you dissolved.”

People anticipated an angry response. People awaited a dreadful response. People expected a veritable earthquake of a response but were surprised to see the leader’s head contract that day and shrink toward the leader’s chest till it almost vanished in the folds of his dark robe.

His head became an insignificant blister on his shoulders. Then his body immediately began to shake with an alarming tremor. This feverish shaking was accompanied by the sound of muffled laughter — an ignoble, uncanny, detestable rattle that so provoked and poisoned their bodies with shudders and nausea that many people present were sure they confronted at that hour the scarecrow of the fields, and were no longer in the presence of the leader.

The sorcerer, however, caught his breath and popped out of his flask to address the people in clear language. “Woe to anyone who waits for people’s gratitude! Woe to a ruler who expects any acknowledgment for a benefaction, because people construe good deeds as evil ones!”

In a far corner, near the exterior wall, a local notable whispered, “For a citizen to dare to address a ruler insolently — our ancestors have warned us — is a harbinger of evil!”

The leader, however, did not notice this whispered comment. Perhaps he did but ignored it. He clasped his hands behind his back and paced in the courtyard for a time. He stopped. Then he said, as if addressing himself, “What you all consider to have been the slaughter of the elite, others consider deliverance from an oppressive group. What some of you think was incitement of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, others think of as a return of usurped rights to those whose rights they had once been. Today most of you consider the importation of women to have been a foolhardy adventure and evil, but yesterday the majority of you considered it a necessity that saved the lineage from the ghoul of extinction. So what do the people actually want? Or, is there no way to satisfy man, who has a natural tendency toward wild fluctuations, anarchy, and insurrection?”

He advanced two steps toward the assembled crowd and glared at them defiantly and challengingly. Then he tossed out an importunate challenge: “I will give you everything I possess if you answer my question: What does man want?”

You could have heard a pin drop in the courtyard.

1

During the first stage of the siege, the strategist pinned his hopes on the desert and told the vassals that the wilderness had always been a resource for both landowners with water and enemies raiding other tribes. Rubbing his hands together repeatedly, he had said gloatingly, “The party that lays siege to another group, according to the customary law of the desert, stands outside the walls, far from the water — unlike the group inside the walls where the well of water is located.”

But, in only a matter of days, this claim was rebutted, because the belligerent armies — which had supplied their water needs from the well called Harakat at the fringes of the Western Hammada — disrupted the flow of caravans and the importation of food stuffs, which the leader discovered were no less critical than water, because the harvest of the oasis had not been adequate even for the original inhabitants. How could it suffice once the number of inhabitants had multiplied many times, when foreign communities and lineages had crowded into the oasis from distant lands, and when women’s wombs — after the recent raids — had supplied it with columns of a new generation (which was, if possible, even more ravenous)?

Realizing that he had miscalculated, the sorcerer reconsidered. He decided to resort to every sorcerer’s favorite weapon: an underhanded scheme!

He selected a bevy of the most beautiful women in the oasis and sent them as a gift to the leader of the foreigners. Along with this present he sent an oral message via a spokesman.

In this message, he acknowledged that he had read the leader’s message. He lauded its author for his sagacity in crafting its symbolism and said he understood that it was incumbent on him, as a condition for peace, to return the women whom men of his tribes had abducted. So here he was sending the leader a first group of women as a confidence-building gesture. With reference to the rumor that the distinguished leader was demanding the return of his youngest daughter (who was reportedly abducted one day and brought to the oasis), he could assure him truthfully that this claim was false, because he had searched the oasis house by house, nook by nook, and rock by rock, but not discovered the alleged victim. Should any doubt remain in the heart of His Honor the Leader concerning the veracity of this claim, he could send messengers to investigate and to search all the houses and nooks.