Reminiscences on the Death of Gemal the SorcererR.K. Duncan
5200 words Sami was just putting the last touches on his painting of the Prophet Selim, who had seen God as a dove descending. The light streaming through the tall windows of the warehouse loft he shared with four housemates was brighter than the dawn of the canvas, but it made it easy to judge color, and Sami could move his canvas around the loft-circling balcony to get whatever light he needed as the sun moved. Now, in the mid-morning, the light came from the northeast, and he turned his easel to catch it sidelong, so that he cast no shadow over the work and didn’t have to squint into the sun. The painting was anachronistic enough to outrage any traditionalists once it was shown, set as it was in the modern Tula harbor, cranes at work in the background, dock workers, mostly Franks or Tatars, rushing to their shifts. Anyone likely to object to the inaccuracy would be more focused on the image of the prophet itself; Sami had painted him to closely resemble the banished sorcerer Gemal Atarwaz, with green turban, staff upraised to greet the descending dove, and a thick beard where the historical ascetic had shaved face and head to bare himself to god. Below Sami, on the main floor, Touma was doing battle with the old, cantankerous wood-stove, wrenching the sticky flue handle open enough to let the fire build to cooking heat. Sweat dripped down the crimson fuzz on the buzzed side of their head, as they swore the damned thing must have rusted shut in last night’s rain, and bent their tall, thin frame half inside the stove to look. Both looked away from their work when Isaac burst in, arms full of bags and packages. His thin face was full of tearful emotion, and it made him look even younger than he always did. Isaac was the youngest of the five friends living here, a broad shouldered young man still awkward in his frame He dragged scuffed shoes over the rough wood floor a moment before he spoke. “Gemal is dead. I heard the readers cry it from the telegraph station. I brought everything we need for the memorial.” He tottered to the island of a threadbare eastern carpet in the center of the loft, and spilled his packages onto the round dining table as the others put away their work and came to join him. Touma brought plates, and in a few moments the table was laid with phyllo pastries, coils of cheese and apricot, parcels of honeyed pistachios. Mismatched glasses sat ready for the date wine and the mahia. Touma glanced at the curtain rooms of their absent housemates. “Should we wait for everyone to get home? I know Ev’ has an early shift today.” Sami answered before Isaac could voice the offense in his face. “No. The dead come first. We begin the memorial as soon as we have heard of the death. That’s the right way.” Isaac must have left whatever day-work he had found when he heard about Gemal. It was custom and prophet-given tradition for the close family of the dead to hold their remembrance at once on hearing of the loss, and while no employer would be giving time off to any mourner for the old sorcerer, all the housemates knew how Isaac felt about him. Sami poured a drink of the harsh anise spirit and slammed it back in one gulp. Experience and his position as father figure for the little motley band let him control his throat and not cough at the shock. He took a coiled pastry and ate it in four precise bites, visibly attending to flavor and texture. He poured a glass of wine, lifting the bottle high so that the falling liquid caught the light with a sense of ritual and spectacle, then settled back into his chair. Both the younger ones had ceded him the high-backed armless one that he preferred. They left the mahia alone and took pastries and wine. “Do you want to make the invocation, Isaac?” Asked Sami. The young man nodded eagerly. Sami smiled benevolently at him and put a steadying hand over Isaac’s on the table. Isaac’s voice shook a little with emotion. “Friends of Gemal the Sorcerer, what is the best—what is the worthiest story you can tell of him, that he may live in other hearts, since his is still and silent now?” He swallowed and pulled out a smudged handkerchief to dab at not-quite-crying eyes. Sami sipped his wine and stared into the middle distance, squinting at the bright windows. He tapped the fingers of his right hand on his plump belly as he thought. “Gemal the Sorcerer refused to teach me once. This was when I was fifteen. I knew him to see of course. Everyone did, but we’d never spoken before. I’d just started to be told I was a bright kid, special, going somewhere. I started painting a little; a teacher gave me watercolors to play with after school, and my father took me to a few galleries on Templeday sometimes, but I thought everyone telling me I was going to do something meant more than just art. Something bigger, and all I could think of was sorcery. “I stopped Gemal in the square outside his tower one day and asked to be his apprentice. He said no; magic was a different way of seeing the world, and he couldn’t teach it to me. But he told me to keep painting, that I might find a way of seeing that was just as good as his if I did. I would have been angry if my parents or teachers or anyone said anything so pat, but there was always that little charm in his voice that made me think he knew what he was talking about. “He remembered me after, came to my shows at school. He bought two pieces once, for much more than they were worth, to help me pay for my last year. I’d seen all the masterpieces in his tower by then, so I knew it was for me, not because they were good enough to hang there.” He took another sip of wine and settled farther back into his chair. Before anyone spoke, the door banged open again and this time Gerard, the longshoreman, was panting in the doorway. The light brown hair that marked him out as a Frank was wild, and his shirt was rumpled over his broad chest, his face redder than its perpetual sunburn. He looked a moment at he table. “You’ve heard then.” “It’s bad in the streets.” He shook his head. “The purity priests and all their mob are throwing a rally in front of his old tower, and setting bonfires around it like they tried last year. And they’re beating foreigners in the streets for a laugh, too.” He showed them his torn sleeve and the growing bruises under the tear. “I got off easy. They’re not out in this quarter yet, just down around the tower and the docks, and they didn’t follow once I got away.” No one asked where the city Militia had been. They knew well enough how the black-caps felt about white-robe rallies and about foreign-born dockworkers. Gerard slumped tiredly into a chair at the table and motioned the rest to go on. “I can listen to stories as well as the rest of you, and I could use a bite anyway. As if Gerard’s report of bonfires had conjured it, a scent of acrid smoke began to creep in the open windows. Isaac took his shot of Mahia fast and easy as water and leaned forward, elbows on the table, looking from face to face for his friends’ approval as he talked. “I worked for Gemal the Sorcerer, when he still lived in the city. I met him when I was living in one of the squats around his tower to keep off the street and he offered me work. “I remember once I carried his bags shopping at the street market in Hilltop quarter, where all the country people brought their garden stuff and herbs and healing stones.” He shook. He had been shaking a little the whole time, as if his tears came in vibration instead of salt. “He kept a thunderbolt for a pet, you know? Most of the time it just looked like a snake, so white it was almost blue. But when his, Gemal’s temper was up, it would crackle instead of hissing, and it would shed light in a dim room. If you tried to touch it then, all your hair would stand on end. He let me play with it sometimes, when I was just a stupid street kid he hired to be kind.” He swallowed, looked down at the table as if it was a picture of the memory. His hands played around opposite wrists, tracing invisible ropes or serpents. “I only saw him let it loose once, there in that market. It was back twelve years ago, when the purity priests were making their first push against sorcery, caning people for witchcraft in the streets. We were walking in the market, him just looking like some old Rumish merchant in his robe and green turban, and then some fanatic in a white jacket pulled a knife and went for a poor old woman selling charms and sachets off a carpet. He was shouting about making the city pure. Everyone was shouting and pushing till I thought we’d be trampled. “Gemal just pointed at the man, and he said something I’m sure I heard. It was something like ‘vur-shim-shek,’ but it sounds wrong when I say it.” His eyes flicked round the table again. “There was big flash, so white and bright everyone was blind for a long while, and a crack so loud it was like being inside a bomb. “When I could see again, the Pure was gone, just black ash, and the ground where he had been was dirty glass. “It’s funny you talking about how he told you what magic was, Sami. I asked him how he could do it, after he killed that man so easy, and he told me magic was like how recognizing someone all of a sudden makes you say their name, or like straightening a crooked painting. He could see how the world should change and the hard thing was to keep from doing it. “The Pures never would have dared to go after you like that if he were still here, Ger.’ Never.” Isaac took two of each pastry and ate them quickly in small, repetitive bites without a pause, hunching over his hands while he did. The scent of smoke grew worse, and a slight haze crept over the sun as the friends sat and digested another memory. Gerard took a deep drink of date wine, swallowed a sweet pastry in one long bite, and washed it down with mahia. “I never knew the old man the way you all did, but I remember his fireworks. He used to set off fireflowers all green and silver and red over his tower on Templeday. And I remember how the top of his tower was always lit up like a green moon. “I used it to steer my way home my first year in the city, when our apartment was in the wharf quarter and I had a job sweeping at Mansi’s bakery after school. It was the only way I could pick through all those little alleys without signs in the dark. My parents made me learn the script before we came so I could read the signs, you know. So I could try and fit in, but it didn’t do much good. They couldn’t teach me how to talk, or how to find my way at night. “Gemal the Sorcerer’s tower was my first friend in Tula, before any of the other children talked to me.” Sami and Touma glanced out the windows. The smoke was thick over the city now, hazing the noon sun as it blew south from the harbor. “Shut the windows with me, would you, Isaac?” asked Sami. They both stood and circled the big room, winding the tall casements closed. It would get hot, and Sami drew several curtains to keep some sun out, but heat was more bearable than the smoke; whatever was burning out in the city smelled dirty. When they came back to the island of the table and carpet, there was a long moment of awkward looking out and guessing, and the talk drifted to inconsequential things for a while, everyone taking the excuse not to think of what was going on outside. It was rude of larger problems to intrude on the intimacy of a private remembrance. Touma was still coughing after throwing a big shot of mahia back too fast when Ev’ stumbled in, sweat on her face, ash on her nurse’s red and drab uniform, blood still under her nails. Her mouth was tight and her eyes were wide and red-rimmed. If Sami played the father for the loft’s patchwork family, Ev’s was closest to a mother for the rest, and seeing her so obviously shaken worried them all. Sami and Isaac were up at once and helped Ev’ to the table. Sami ceded her the softest chair, and Gerard brought a glass of water, still cold from the stone cistern. “What happened, Ev’?” asked Isaac, leaning close. She took a long drink before she snapped. “They fucking burned Gemal’s tower. The whole block he built around it, the hostels and the squats farther out that people never got chased out of. It’s all burning, and the tower. And the Pures won’t let anyone try to put it out.” She paused, and stared at nothing, and trembled for a little while. Everyone was shaken. Ev’ was usually iron control in a small frame, only letting loose on the dance floor. Only Sami had ever seen her cry. Ev’ went on, voice shaking while her white-knuckled hands were steady, doubled around her water glass. “They’re…They’re killing people who get out of the squats. Just beating them in the streets. Some of them, the white-robe thugs, came to the hospital to stop us treating ‘sinners’ and ‘witches.’ “I had to get out.” She stared ahead at nothing. She fingered the row of steel rings that marched along the curve of her right ear, slid down to where a tattoo peeked above the line of her uniform on her neck. They all knew why she couldn’t have stayed longer with Pures hunting in the hospital. “They think they own the city now, and the militia are letting them do what they like. Even when the doctor called, they still wouldn’t throw the Pures out.” “Isn’t anyone fighting back?” demanded Touma. “The wharfs aren’t white-robe territory. Is the whole city just rolling over?” They slapped a fist into their open palm. Ev’ shrugged, defeated. “Sure, some idiots are out there getting beaten. We had plenty of them in the hospital, next to the burned ones.” “We’ve got to do something,” said Touma. They stood so fast their chair fell back and clattered on the threadbare rug. “If those fuckers think they own the city, we’ll show them they don’t. Now, before it gets worse. Who’s fucking coming with me?!” They pulled on heavy black boots. Clubwear, but intimidating. Isaac rose, looking pale. “You’re right. Let’s show them whose city it is.” His voice was more tentative than the words, and he glanced back at the table, but he didn’t sit down. “You just going to let them scare you off the streets, Ger’?” prodded Touma. Gerard hesitated, looking from the exhausted Ev’ to Touma by the door. “I’ll take care of Ev’,” said Sami. “You go.” Gerard sighed and rose. He went to his curtained bedroom and returned with a long prybar over his shoulder. He had never taken off his work boots. The three went out, keeping close and chattering nothings to pep themselves up. Sami stood behind Ev’ in the quiet loft, rubbing her shoulders. After a little while of it, he brought a cool cloth from the sink for her hands and face and sat beside her at the table. Ev’ poured a shot and took it. There was still soot on the glass when she set it down. “Hell, I’ll tell a story. Why not?” Sami nodded, and pushed the pastries toward her. “I remember the first time I saw Gemal the Sorcerer, in the line for costume night at The Lillies. I hadn’t gotten tired of cutting up my uniforms for the club yet then, so I was a nurse. When he got into line a bit behind me, I thought Gemal was just someone in costume as him, green turban, fake beard, robe covered in stars, but he was close enough that when I kept looking, I could see the stars move in the cloth. “I think most people didn’t realize it was him until the doorman said he was too old and tried to keep him out. I had just gone in, and I turned around when Gemal laughed. He grew up tall, twelve feet maybe, and he was all covered in black shadows, a lord of the underworld with three burning lampads, beautiful and naked and burning on leashes in his train.” She tapped her foot with nerves or remembered rhythm, or both. “He kept changing shapes the whole night. Sometimes he was djinn, all fire and smoke, or a dog-headed man, or a serpent twisting through all the dancers. He would offer to be dog for anyone who had a leash, or turn ears and tails and horns real for the evening. “I always liked dancing with him, because he never got tired and he never expected anything. Lots of men, especially on costume nights, just came to look pretty. They’d dance a bit to show off and get sweaty, and then lean at the bar and make come-ons, but Gemal never stopped. He was always still going when they kicked us out for curfew, and if someone needed seeing home, he’d take them in his carriage that went without horses or just walk beside to keep the watch off. “He came with me and few other friends from nurses’ school one night to a place that opened at dawn and gave you free drinks with breakfast to get around the temperance bell, and we got stopped by Militia looking for a payoff. I was afraid it would be a vice charge, until Gemal stepped up looking like a colonel and sent them scampering. He was always good for a laugh and making big men fall down to earth.” Her story trailed off, and by the drifting of her eyes, Sami could guess she was back at the hospital again. A bad shift had a long hangover. 
The streets were full of smoke as Gerard, Isaac and Touma headed north toward the wharf-quarter, where Gerard had been for his dawn shift, where the tower was burning. A light breeze off the water blew the smoke over the converted warehouses and factories of their home quarter, and the tops of newer tenements were lost in it. They were far from the only ones in the street. Uncertain people, young, most of them visibly pierced or tattooed, gender-bent, or otherwise alternative, milled around outside their lofts and smoke-filled apartment blocks. There were a few paler, light-haired Franks like Gerard, but most of them had been gentrified out farther west as the neighborhood was converted for the hungry young offshoots of Tula’s middle class. The first time they passed a knot of people, Touma shouted. “What are you all standing around for? The fire’s at the sorcerer’s old tower. Fight’s there too, come on!” Most people did not follow, and the streets emptied as they came closer to the tower and the square before it. A roaring sound drowned idle conversation, and the heat became a weight, squeezing sweat out of them like sponges until the soot clung to them like a second skin. When they came out of the narrow streets onto the square, they saw the tower burning. The whole height of the spire was wrapped in fire, and flames poured out of every window, though the stone was not consumed. At the tower’s feet, only black ashes and a few half-burned beams were left of the wooden houses Gemal the Sorcerer had built once and let free to any who needed them. In the middle of the square, as close to the burning tower as the heat allowed, a solid bloc of white-clad people packed around a makeshift platform, and one robed figure exhorted them from it; a tall man, shaved smooth on head and face, shaking his scarred hands in the air as he screamed over the roar of the flames and the rushing wind that pulled everything toward the burning tower. The counter-protest was patchy, little knots of people who drifted closer and farther as the edges of the purity mob shifted. Locals, half-homed or homeless in the fire kept their knots separate from dockers coming off shift, and the young people waited farther back as they drifted from other quarters, looking and wondering and not sure who they were more afraid of. At the west edge of the square, a line of black-capped militia waited, hands on batons or pistols, but they made no move to stop the brewing fight. “Look,” said Isaac. “It’s that mad bastard Tadros. When did he come back out in public?” “If we’re still telling stories,” Touma said, “I remember when Gemal had that ‘debate’ with Tadros right here, where they’ve put up the stage. Gemal challenged him to prove that everything they say about sorcery and foreigners and country people and women and everyone they hate really was out of the scriptures.” The other two leaned close to hear him over the shouting of the priest and the noise of the wind. “I watched it, and Tadros had the best of it to begin with. You know how the Pures always talk about ‘in the tradition of the prophets,’ and ‘our forefathers believed,’ and all that mealy mouthed cover for ‘Tula for the Tulasa and fuck the country people’. Gemal knew all the prophets back and forth, though I don’t think he ever went to temple, and he quoted at Tadros and challenged all his nonsense, but Tadros just talked over Gemal until he had the whole crowd with him, ready to beat some poor devils out of the city, so Gemal made him scream like a bird every time he tried to lie. He shouted till he was red in the face, but it only came out like a hawk screeching, and Gemal would just ask him to repeat, with the chapter and verse number, please. “Everyone laughed and cheered for Gemal, and they saw through all the Pures’ lies for a day, at least.” “Maybe,” said Gerard, “but it was after that debate the Pures really started hounding Gemal, and pressing to have him exiled. They got their way, no matter how stupid Gemal made them look.” “I wish we could shut them up like he did, though,” said Isaac. They had been drifting closer to the Pures, along with a thin crowd of other onlookers, and now the mob turned and noticed them. It only took moments for chanting to break out. “Tula for the Tulasa! “Job stealers out! “Beggars off the street! “Witches out!” Rocks and bottles flew, mostly at visible foreigners like Gerard. The purity mob put out spearing tendrils, driving into the crowd, and people they came close to gave ground and ran. A bottle hit Gerard, not hard enough to shatter before it hit the ground. “No way to do this,” he muttered. He shook himself and shouted, pushing air with his big chest. “Dockers front! Make a fucking line!” He ran for the front, prybar up over his head like a standard, and a few began following him. He shouted at other dockers from his own shift or the later one, and they came at his call. Touma and Isaac came close behind. “Come on.” Gerard began to sing. “Up, up, and up, we lift ‘em.” Other dockers joined the forming line and the song. “Down, down, and down we drop ‘em.” As the line of dock-workers solidified, the rest of the crowd pressed in behind them, and they pushed the Pures back toward Tadros’ platform to the rhythm of the working tune. 
While Ev’ showered off the grime of her hospital shift, Sami returned to his canvas. The hazy light of smoked-over noon fit the dawn light he had painted. The canvas almost shone in its own twilight. It looked different now than when he had left it. Cloudy somehow, like something waiting to be born instead of almost finished. He passed a cloth lightly over the dry part in case soot had settled there, but it still seemed to have gained the quality of a thunderhead about to break, and he could not see how to restore it. He returned to the saint’s face for a few strokes, thickening the white beard and adding whimsy to the smile, making the image more perfectly Gemal than he had planned. It felt right in his bones, like a something pushing back into place. He added detail to the workers in the background. He had intended them shadowy, but now a few lighter strokes brought out fair hair or long Tatar moustaches, worn; torn clothes and tired postures made them solid, and helped push back the feeling of ominous potential that had overtaken his canvas. 
With lines solidified, the Pures and the protesters shouted back and forth. Tadros’ voice boomed from his bullhorn. The heat still sheeting off the burning tower felt like a wall that hekd the protesters back and shielded the fanatics. “Now is the time to clean the city, faithful of the Prophets!” Tadros shouted, and the Pures stopped shouting slogans to hear him. Touma shook their head and spat. A tap on a tall shoulder and a shouted request got them lifted between two solid dockers, high enough to shout over the crowd, and for their half-shaved, half turquoise head to be seen. “See, faithful and pure,” screamed Tadros, “ the foreigners and deviants who will ravage your wives and daughters? Who will ruin your city and leave you homeless? Penniless?” Touma drew in breath and shouted back before the crowd could drown them out. “Damn right this deviant will give your wife a better time than you can! Do you mean the first one Tadros, who took you to court for beating her? Or the new one you made cut out her tongue because women ought not speak in the temple?” The Pures shouted murder after that, but Touma knew they’d scored a point. The purity priests spoke about desert fathers castrating themselves to keep virtuous, and silencing women as the same, but even among the rank and file streetfighters, it was viewed uneasily. Most of them wouldn’t dare tell their wives to do it, or marry the kind of fanatic who really would, so they made up for their failure of virtue with violence, and threw themselves against the docker’s line with new fury. Touma kept shouting taunts and encouragement, but they weren’t sure who could hear above the din. 
Only one last thing, and the painting would be finished. Sami mixed blue and his purest white and twisted a thin line around the figure’s wrist, a serpent, or a thunderbolt. His brush dragged for a moment, as if there was a roughness in the canvas or a weakness in his arm, and then it ran on and finished the line. He stepped back. It was done. God the dove descended to Tula’s harbor, just as it would be at dawn, the cranes already busy, the streets empty but for the saint and workers rushing early to their shifts. It looked alive, and different. Now that he looked again, he knew the light over the bay was never so diffuse, the clouds never so pearly, that a little break of sun could not pick out one figure so and leave all the rest shaded. But everything he had done was right next to the rest. A different world, or a different way of seeing this one. He had undone the thunderhead unfinished-ness of before, and now the truth shone on the canvas. 
At last the protest turned to a battle. The militia moved in behind the protesters, and the Pures took the signal and pressed in. With sticks, bottles, knives, and burning brands from the still blazing tower, they came on, and they rolled through the dockers into the crowd. Gerard laid down one and two and three with his bar, but the press of the crowd behind him pushed too many inside his reach and the went down under the weight of them. They would be on Isaac in moment. He pulled his knife and snapped it open, but he was no fighter, not even when he had been on the streets. He tried to be ready. Something tingled on his wrist, and the word that had never come right before fell back into his mind, like the name of an old friend. The world was crooked, but he could push it right again. A big white-jacketed man with a thick stave was right in front of him, stick raised to attack. “Shimshek Vurmak!” There was a flash. A crack so loud it was like being inside a bomb. When Isaac could see again, white-clad figures were scattered like torn pages, and more were sitting up dazed, or running. Militia behind were shouting something for people to disperse, but there was clear ground right in front of him. He found Gerard, groaning among other fallen dockers, and went to him. Gerard was bruised and battered, but he was breathing and his eyes open at Issac’s touch. He reached up to Isaac’s left hand. “Look at you.” Isaac could feel a tingling again where Gerard grabbed his wrist, and he looked down and there was Gemal’s lightning bolt, still twined around his wrist, not gone, not a dream or a fluke. He could feel it, how to make it strike again. He followed Gerard’s eyes to the tower. It was not burning anymore, and there was no mark of fire on it. “Can you make the top light, do you think?” asked Gerard. “Or set off fireworks?” Isaac felt himself smile, and he felt the world balanced, waiting for his touch. “Let’s find out.” The tower door opened for him, and he helped Gerard up. They walked across the emptying square together. 
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R.K. Duncan
R. K. Duncan is a fat queer polyamorous wizard and author of fantasy, horror, and occasional sci-fi. He writes from a few rooms of a venerable West Philadelphia row home, where he dreams of travel and the demise of capitalism. His other full-time job is keeping house for himself and his live-in partner. Before settling on writing, he studied linguistics and philosophy at Haverford college. He attended Viable Paradise 23 in 2019. His occasional musings and links to other work can be found at rkduncan-author.com.
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