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  ‘Me neither.’

  They sat listening to the river and the insect song floating above it, now and then looking at the mosque, Wamaq examining Qes’s face openly for a few moments and Qes allowing it. After they had told Qes that Leila was getting married, they had had to hold him down and he had torn himself out of his clothes. They locked him in a room. When he broke free a week later it was on her wedding day and the havoc he wrought in the bazaar, lunging at possible weapons, made many people think the wedding procession tiger had slipped its leash.

  Wamaq said, ‘And I don’t like the feeling I get when I think of the animals and birds in that room. What kind of a world is it where you aren’t free even after death?’

  The waiter brought them their food and by way of making conversation said, ‘Those things are a mystery to me.’ A man in denim jeans had just gone by.

  ‘Don’t tell me, Uncle,’ Qes said. ‘I tried on a pair of Western trousers once. Didn’t know how to walk.’

  ‘Which way is the bus station?’ Wamaq asked the man.

  ‘The bus station? Where do you want to go? My brother has a car you can hire instead.’ Just then his mobile phone rang – the ringtone was a recitation of verses from the Quran – and he walked away, to the relief of Wamaq and Qes who would have preferred not to have awakened his curiosity. Not for nothing were roadside food places known as ‘newspapers made of brick’.

  After eating they rode to the train station instead, stopping wordlessly for a minute at a bend in the road to watch a church in the distance being consumed by a powerful fire, the rioters clustered around it.

  At the ticket window, they asked the name of the farthest destination it was possible to travel to from that station, making a note especially of the non-stop services over the next twenty-four hours. Coming back to the river they crossed over to the island and said their prayers at the mosque, Wamaq’s furtive nod indicating Leila’s room to Qes. The two guards were still there.

  After the prayers, they left the building and walked away along the rim of the island, flocks of water birds stirring in the reeds or hovering in the air with piercing screams. There was the smell of leaves decaying in the earth. In places upriver – the mosque out of sight behind monolithic banyans and Persian lilacs – other birds had hollowed countless nest-holes in the vertical walls of the mudbanks, making them look like giant sponges.

  ‘We’ll come here with her,’ said Wamaq. ‘We have to get a boat and hide it here in advance. We’ll use it to cross over to the riverbank.’ He pointed to the secluded spot on the other side of the river. ‘Hardly anyone goes there. The motorbike will be waiting – you and Leila will use it to go to the station, get on the train and leave. I’ll follow later.’

  It was getting dark but the pure white shell of an egg fallen to the ground below a nest-hole drew Wamaq’s attention. He went to pick it up to put it back in the nest, but it had cracked. The sound of astonishment he gave upon discovering a rifle bullet inside the egg brought Qes to him. Qes put his hand in a nest and removed an intact egg, pale indigo in colour. Breaking the shell at the tip he turned it upside down, and the metal bullet slipped out on to the palm of his hand along with the living albumen.

  They walked along the perforated wall of earth, counting: each nest held at least half a dozen eggs and there were hundreds of nests.

  ‘And here are the black serpents waiting to feed on what comes out of those eggs,’ Qes said when they found large wooden crates hidden among the reeds and opened one of them. It was full of guns.

  Just then they heard voices and moved deeper into the reeds, from where they saw a group of men arrive and begin to drag the crates out into the open. The weapons were distributed and then they went towards the wall of nests. They all wore prayer caps and had been among the worshippers earlier. The route Wamaq and Qes were planning to use – to take Leila off the island – was exactly the route that had been used to smuggle the weapons on to it.

  The brothers emerged after the men were gone, and as they looked into the empty nests they heard bursts of gunfire from the mosque. They hurried towards it but it was difficult for them to enter because the panicked worshippers were trying to flee in the opposite direction, shouting and screaming, trampling each other underfoot. Someone told them that the imam of the mosque and all of his aides had been assassinated, the entire staff being replaced by Nadir Shah’s men.

  When at last they managed to get in, they found the prayer hall empty. The bodies of the two guards lay outside Leila’s room. Wamaq and Qes moved towards it and looked in. The old woman was sitting on a deerskin on the floor – undisturbed at her prayer. It was as though the gunfire – which began again outside at that moment – did not penetrate her ears while she communed with Allah.

  Two servant girls crouched fearfully on the other side of the bed. ‘All this is Nadir Shah’s doing, isn’t it?’ one of them whimpered.

  The other shook her head, looking with undisguised contempt towards the old woman. ‘It’s the wrath of Allah.’

  Wamaq asked, ‘Where’s Leila?’ but there was no answer. He and Qes went out and began looking for her separately among the people running towards the boats on the water’s edge. Half an hour later, Qes was walking by an upstairs room when he came to a standstill. He entered and quietly spoke her name.

  A few small hexagons of light were coming in from outside, scattered on the walls and floor like ghosts of diamonds. She called to him from the far corner. It was perhaps a room meant for scholars because there seemed to be books everywhere, ink pots and pens, and nibs that rang musically when they poured themselves on to the floor, his elbow nudging the box.

  ‘You sound like paper,’ he said as he touched her.

  ‘It’s the Shirt of Joseph.’ Putting her arms around his neck, she added, ‘But I feel like I am almost blind. I want to see you clearly.’

  ‘We can’t put on the light just yet,’ he replied. ‘I’ll go and find Wamaq and then we’ll leave. Lock the door from the inside.’

  ‘My husband will be here any moment,’ she said.

  ‘I know. With a hundred armed men of his own.’

  There was no human noise as he descended the outdoor staircase and crossed the large half-lit courtyard. He was walking towards the main entrance of the mosque when he met Wamaq. He told him he had found Leila and the two brothers were heading towards the water’s edge, wondering about a boat, when suddenly Timur appeared ahead of them and said, ‘Halt.’ They stopped just where the darkness met the light.

  ‘What’s the situation on this side?’ Timur asked. Ten or so of his men were behind him.

  Qes shook his head. ‘We don’t know what’s going on.’

  ‘Where are you coming from?’ Timur tried to look into the darkness behind them. He recognized Wamaq. ‘Didn’t I see you earlier today – the boatman?’ Then he turned to Qes and seemed to become transfixed. Qes feared his thoughts were being read.

  Timur seemed to be in disbelief over something, even shock. He took a step towards Qes and said, ‘Where is my wife?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Move forward just an inch into the light,’ he said, walking towards Qes without taking his eyes off him, the gun raised. He did not stop as he neared and for a second Qes thought he would walk right through him. But then he stopped and reached out his hand to lift the metal nib stuck to Qes’s heart.

  He turned the small shining object in his hand, light coming off it in shards.

  He tossed it gently at Qes’s breast. Just to make sure it would stick again.

  Wamaq raised his hand to stop it from arriving and attaching itself to his brother. The sudden movement caused Timur to turn the gun instinctively towards Wamaq and pull the trigger. In the trace of sound that the bullet left in the atmosphere, Qes watched the blood emerging from his brother’s stomach. First there was a thin line that fell through the air in an intact curve, breaking up just above the ground to land as a chorus of drops. Then, as he w
as being thrown on to his back, a large glowing spurt came out.

  Wamaq fell backwards into the darkness and lay shaking and Timur fired a second and a third bullet into him without looking. Just then there was a deafening burst of gunfire from somewhere nearby that claimed Timur’s attention. It was a matter of perhaps two or three seconds, but it was enough for Qes to turn round and start to run. They must have followed him but he could neither see nor hear anything any more.

  When he regained his senses he was in the ten-foot reeds behind the mosque. The sound of gunfire came in short bursts and from various parts of the building, now near, now distant, like a flock of swallows circling the area very fast. When he remembered, he climbed out into the courtyard and Wamaq was still there, alone, his eyes open and his breathing shallow. Qes half lifted, half dragged him into the light and touched the wounds. Each bullet hole was less than an inch in width, but from the amount of blood it was as though the stomach had been torn open by claws and giant fangs. It was his death – the invisible beast eating into the body.

  ‘Qes.’

  He lowered his ear to his brother’s ice-cold lips. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Qes, it hurts.’

  ‘I know. Open your eyes. Stay awake. Someone has just gone to get a doctor. You’ll be all right.’

  He felt a sudden, quickly subsiding wave of terror and in its wake he was filled with an immense love, for his brother and their life together, and for the world in which they had had that life. He got up and went towards the boats, but gunfire forced him back. Upstairs, the door stood open and the light had been switched on in the scholars’ room when he got there. He called to Leila several times but received no sound in return.

  In the courtyard, Wamaq’s body was folded up like that of an unborn child.

  ‘Qes.’

  He took his brother’s head in his lap. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Isn’t the doctor here yet?’

  ‘You always were strange. I told you about the doctor just one second ago. He’s not going to fly here, is he?’

  ‘Did you? It feels much longer.’

  ‘You’ll be all right.’

  ‘Qes, I’m thirsty.’

  Qes went to the river and entered the reeds, taking off his shirt when he got to the current that broke and swirled into dangerous eddies. Soaking the shirt in the water, he brought it back dripping, and gently squeezed a little from the sleeve into Wamaq’s mouth.

  ‘Qes, it hurts so much.’

  Their father had told them once in his cane-liquor eloquence, ‘The strength with which a molar holds on to the jaw when you have it extracted is as nothing to the strength with which the soul is attached to the body. When they begin to tear away from each other, the torment is unbearable.’

  Qes lowered his own forehead on to Wamaq’s and wept silently, the roots of Wamaq’s hair smelling of the bitter Lifebuoy soap from the bath a few hours earlier. He got up and went into the night again, trying to find a way off the island. By the time he came back, Wamaq’s heart had stopped beating. The eyes had lifted so that the whites beneath the irises showed – an unmoving stare, transfixed by whatever it was that the dead could see but could not convey.

  The fingers of his right hand were still closed around the nib.

  VI

  One morning ten months later, the black air-conditioned jeep with the tinted windows left the mansion, carrying Razia and Leila, two servant girls, the driver and a bodyguard who was the size he was because he injected himself with cattle steroids. Leila was being taken to a desert shrine to receive a blessing, a two-day journey from the mansion and the Indus.

  Nothing lay around the 300-year-old shrine except low, cactus-covered hills and sand dunes, and ancient time. Shaken by the ferocity and organization of Nadir Shah’s raid – unsuccessful though it proved in the end – and to try another path towards a male child, Timur had married again. The marriage took place within weeks of the attack. At twenty-one, the new bride was five years older than Leila. She lived at the mansion with them and was expecting a child any day. The Book of Omens predicted it to be a boy. Timur continued to demand from Leila what she owed him, however; insisting she make up for the years of torture to which she had subjected him.

  The saint who lay buried at the shrine had had control of certain female djinns – those that guarded the souls of dead warriors, conducting them safely from the battlefield to Paradise. The she-djinns also guided the souls of those women who had died giving birth to boys, for having sacrificed their lives to provide future warriors.

  A group of nine sacred men resided there now, renowned throughout the country – and throughout the Pakistani immigrant communities around the planet – for helping women to have male children. Prior to lying down with her husband with the intention of conceiving, the woman would spend one whole week in strict seclusion with the nine exalted personages, praying, meditating and eating the simple food they cooked. Afterwards, the woman would speak of holy visitations, of intense dreams and hallucinations. She would have no recollection of entire hours of the seven-day period. If she failed to have a male child, she would return to beg forgiveness from the saint and the nine men, for not having cleansed her mind and soul of impurities thoroughly enough, for having trespassed on and squandered their valuable time.

  Just before midnight Razia brought Leila to the room where she was to spend the week with the holy personages. They walked to the wooden bed in the far corner and she made Leila lie down on her right side, so she could face Mecca. One of the servant girls was carrying a box of one-inch iron nails and a hammer, and, working slowly all around Leila, Razia nailed her clothes to the bed. This didn’t have anything to do with the nine holy men. This precaution was taken at the mansion too: it was the result of her leaving the mosque’s white room on the night of Nadir Shah’s raid. Whenever possible, if she was to be in a place for longer than a few minutes, Razia had her clothes fixed to the walls or floor.

  Razia and the servant girls would be sleeping in rooms on the other side of the shrine, and they left after they had secured her, leaving behind the nails and hammer so the holy men could resecure Leila after she attended to her toilet.

  Leila, with the thirty spikes holding her immobile, waited anxiously for the men to come to her room. When they entered they brought with them a cool serene scent of violets. They did not approach her, arranging themselves on the other side of the room instead, eyes closed in prayer. Now and then one of them would come, mouthing sacred words as he walked, and after blowing those words softly along the length of her body, he would withdraw.

  She fell asleep as the hours passed, listening to the sandstorm outside the window. Her body woke her in the middle of the night and she saw that all nine men were approaching the bed. They came and surrounded her, their hands in contact with the intimate places of her body. She fought against the nails in her clothes but didn’t have enough strength to uproot herself, wanted to shout out but found her tongue paralysed. She felt terror and then a rage and grief the size of the sky, the rage of the damned and the abandoned, and she imagined once again her mother on the dawn lake, struggling powerlessly in the mist with her assailants. She clearly saw the wings emerge from her body, their movement leaving a scribble of clarity in the gold and silver vapour of the lake.

  The desert shrine was roused a few minutes later by the confusion and shouts of the nine exalted men. Razia went into the room and saw how the window had had its panels shattered and was now open to the violent sandstorm. The empty bed where Leila had been lying was covered with syllables and smears in a radiant silver liquid. The nails that outlined her body had small pinches of fabric and fine threads attached to them, like tiny brilliant feathers, shaking in that great wind from the broken window.

  ‘I suspected right from the beginning that this girl was not real,’ one of the nine men said. ‘So much beauty cannot be human.’

  The sandstorm continued to howl past dawn, and in the morning when the air and sky cleared at last they
spread out on to the dunes. There was so much static from the storm that sheets and jagged fibres of bright blue electricity danced on the ground all around them, climbing silently up their bodies as they walked. They found marks on the sand indicating the recent presence of jackals, gazelles, snakes and beetles, but there was no sign of her in any direction. And then, almost a mile away, her tracks suddenly began, halfway up the low incline of a dune. The footprints were enclosed within two lightly scored continuous lines, as though she had been dragging two sticks behind her. It was early but already the sun was baring its teeth, the heat intense. Her tracks disappeared into a large flock of demoiselle cranes in the distance and they found her at the centre of it, lying face down, exhausted from thirst and the sun.

  They brought her back. Razia didn’t know what to do when she saw her, in despair at the provocations Leila continued to throw at her son.

  ‘That scan at the hospital five months ago didn’t reveal anything of this,’ she said as she stared at the wings on Leila’s back. She had disapproved of Leila having the ultrasound scan to determine the sex of the foetus, because Muhammad had said that no one but Allah held the answers to such mysteries as the country of a person’s death and whether the child growing in a woman’s belly was a boy or a girl. But Timur, saying that these were modern times and that the world was moving on, had insisted – so that the foetus could be aborted if female. To the joy of everyone, the scan showed the fourth child to be male, but when the time came Leila had given birth to a girl yet again. Razia saw it as a punishment from Allah for doubting Muhammad’s word.

  And now there was this new difficulty.

  The wings were gently alive, the feathers giving a slow hypnotic shake as the desert sand fell out of them. They were large and white and they were beautiful like those of the woman-headed steed that had taken Muhammad to Paradise from the minaret in Jerusalem.