Secondhand Sorcery

From there, it should have been a simple matter (relatively speaking) to go on and tell him the whole story. She’d anticipated their language issue, and brought her dictionary, which made it a little easier. Kemal was, as expected, an attentive and charitable listener once he got over the initial shock. But there was a rather large problem: the common word for ‘familiar’ or ‘emissant’ in Turkish, as in Kazakh, was basically ‘jinni.’

The whole concept of synnoesis, of familiars taking on new hosts—even teenagers—which she had expected to be an obstacle, was for him not even a minor complication to the major issue that the entire thing was plain witchcraft dressed up as science. It was not surprising to him that a jinn could jump between hosts; nothing about that was inconsistent with the Quran or the folk tradition surrounding jinn.

“But she’s not a jinni!” she insisted, to little effect. “It doesn’t work that way!”

“Then how does it work?” His tone was reasonable, open. When Nadia did not answer right away, he went on, “I am no Salafi. Science is good. Progress is good. But this does not seem like science or progress to me. My car is a good invention made by science. It takes me where I want to go. It does not change the way I think or feel to do it.”

“This is ridiculous. Ézarine isn’t some kind of devil.”

“The jinn are not devils. They are a kind of being made after angels but before men. They are not all evil. Some are Muslim, even.”

“Ézarine was made less than twenty years ago, in a laboratory somewhere, by a Frenchman named Claude. She can’t be a Muslim, or a Christian, or anything, because she doesn’t really think. She is … made out of Claude’s hopes and fears, the way he thought.”

Kemal shrugged. “Or his hopes and fears invited a jinn to take her form. I do not know how jinn think, though it is said they are drawn to live in remote places.” He gestured at the ruined monastery around them.

“Coming here was my decision. Ézarine is attracted to people. I found her in a mosque in the middle of a town near Istanbul.”

“Really?” He frowned. “Have you tried a cinci?”

She looked up the word. “No, an exorcist will not work,” she said wearily. Too late she remembered the stories from her increasingly murky and distant childhood in Kazakhstan—the fringe world of folk healers and spirit workers claiming secret knowledge. Some said they had been trained by paraphysical scientists, while others cited a more traditional religious background, Muslim or Christian. Many purported to have both kinds of knowledge, mingling the best of each or insisting they were secretly the same.

Father—her real father, Mikhail Voronin—had always tried to steer the family away from such people, insisting it did no good to deal with them. The science of the spirit was a matter of state security, and people who pried too closely into those secrets received unfriendly attention from the authorities, even if they were obviously charlatans, or insane.

Still, they were there, always, everywhere you went, alluded to and acknowledged even if not respected. Even if you were a girl of eight or nine, you heard about their world. Crudely-printed pamphlets and newsletters left in sloppy stacks at the library, madmen on street corners, dumb boys boasting at the playground about the things their cousins could do (though she never met the cousins themselves). In sermons, once or twice, though never in depth, always supporting the regime which had so recently rescued them from communist oppression. Even then Nadia had known it was unwise to go further, if you did not want to meet the oprichnik. No religious body ventured a formal theological opinion on familiars.

But that was in the former Soviet Union—and recently ‘former’ at that. The Muslim world outside Moscow’s influence had no need for that kind of bashful muttering. None of their governments even had paraphysical research programs of their own; Turkey was one of the rare few that had cozied up enough to NATO to have a few citizens trained as emissors and clairvoyants for prestige. The rest of their security needs were met by Americans or other foreigners, who did not care what kind of talk went on in mosques or coffee shops provided it was not in Russian. Their whole region was safely dependent, and any individual grumbler or braggart was no closer to discovering real paraphysical secrets than he was to inventing a rocket to the moon.

So men like Kemal were free to come to whatever conclusion they liked, and men and women who wanted to peddle miracles could operate unmolested. Kemal did not seem troubled when she reminded him his own government employed Usman the Dauntless. “If a jinni can protect us, we can use him,” he said. “And his master will be a man, a grown man. You are a young lady. That is what concerns me most.”

“I know. I didn’t want to get her; my adopted father made me. But I have her now, and I can’t get rid of her. Shouldn’t I use her to make things better, if I can?”

“Of course we have a duty to do good,” he said, looking faintly irritated that it was even a question. “That is not my concern now. I do not know if it will ‘make things better’ at all. I have raised two daughters. You say you are twelve?”

“Thirteen next month.”

“I remember thirteen. For both my girls, it was difficult. They were often angry, upset, made bad choices. But they did not have jinn to deal with. Or ‘par-a-phys-i-cal con-structs,’” he added, sounding the English words out arduously with a roll of his eyes, before she could object. “It makes no difference. A man may take a burden which a child may not, because he has grown, his mind is grown. What will this creature, whatever it is, do to you?”

“That doesn’t matter!” she told him. “I still have her. It’s at least a little my fault that this has happened. Isn’t it even more my fault if I don’t make it right?”

“You are a child,” he repeated mulishly. “Children are responsible for nothing. Only adults can be responsible.”

“I don’t believe that. How can I learn to be responsible as an adult if I don’t start now? Do I let these soldiers take this woman’s husband and lock him away until I turn eighteen, then go and break him out, if he’s still alive?”

“No. This is all madness. I would not trust you with your gun, even if I knew you could use it. Your jinniyah is much more dangerous. If you had a … tankı?” He looked to her appealingly. “Like a truck, with a gun?”

“We just say ‘tank,’ in English and Russian.”

“If you had a ‘tank’ only you could use, I still would not let you use it, because children do not drive tanks!” He pounded his palm with a fist.

Nadia’s fists clenched at her sides. “Let me? Who said anything about letting me? You aren’t my father. You can’t stop me from doing anything, as long as I have Ézarine with me.”

He turned pale, the kind of pale that always spelled danger when it crossed a man’s face. But he only said, with icy calm and a growl in his throat, “Then why do you tell me these things? Does a grown and adult lady need this old man’s approval?”

“No. But I could use your advice. I want to drive my tank into the jail in town today, to let that woman’s husband out. If there is a good reason that will not work, tell me, and I might drive my tank somewhere else. I might take it to a whole different part of Turkey, even. I don’t know what the best way is to use my tank, but I have it and I am going to use it.”

His face sagged in disbelief. “You want me to …”

She thought back to something Mila had said, and smiled. “To be my charioteer.”

Disbelief gave way to bewilderment. “Your what?”

“It isn’t important,” she told him, brushing the question aside with one hand. “A stupid … şaka.” Thank goodness for the dictionary. “I mean that, if you are an adult, you can guide me, can’t you? Give me advice. I am not a Turk, I don’t understand this country like you do.”

“I was a dockworker,” Kemal said. “I watched the men load the boats for twenty years, and shouted at them when they were lazy. I am not a soldier.”

“The soldiers are in town locking up Circassians and looting cigar shops. I do not need a soldier. I know how to fight with Ézarine already. I need a good man, a man I can trust, a man who knows Trabzon, and you are the only one I can find.”

He shook his head and leaned against the wall. “Too much. This is too much. I just met you, child. I do not know how to fight a war, I know nothing of your jinn and their powers.”

“But you know that things are bad, and I have the power to make them better.”

“Or worse.”

“Or worse,” she agreed. “Wouldn’t you rather be able to help me make good decisions?”

He tensed up, so that for a second she thought he was about to take a swing at her. Instead he tugged the dictionary out of her hands, and flipped through it until he found the word he was looking for and slapped a finger down on it. “вымогательство,” she read. Extortion. Yes, she supposed it was. “All right, fine. What would you do, if you controlled Ézarine yourself?”

“Hard to say. But I do not. The burden is not mine, it is yours, and it is too much for a girl of twelve or thirteen to carry. You cannot remove that from the question.”

“And what if doing nothing is a heavier burden?”

“Not the burden of decision. The burden of—what does she do to your soul? A jinniyah and a child?” He took his cap off, ran fingers through his hair. “But the decision is enough. You ask more than you know. Much more.”

“All I want is—“

“If I tell you ‘do this,’ and people die, it is my fault! If I tell you ‘do that,’ and people die, it is my fault for not saying ‘do this!’”

“How is that different from how I live now? Is the ‘burden’ too much for you to carry, but fine for me? You say I’m a little girl. But I can’t put her down. Do you make me carry her alone?”

For a full thirty seconds his face contorted, as he struggled to find words for an answer. In another situation, it might have been funny, to watch his cheeks twitch, to see thought after thought bubble up to his lips only to die before reaching the air. His hands moved too—abortive, spasmodic gestures. At last with a look of sheer despair he turned around and stomped away.

Nadia hurried after him, in case he was going to rage all the way back to his car. When he got out his phone, she felt a moment’s terror that he was going to turn her in, that he was solving his problem by cutting her loose and forcing her to run again. But he did not call or text, only walked back and forth frowning and fiddling with it, and eventually he tucked it away, bowed down to the ground, and started reciting in Arabic.

He was praying on the question; he’d only needed the phone to find the way to Mecca. Nadia smiled, and withdrew back into her monastery to leave him alone. She barely knew Kemal, but was still confident what answer his prayer would give him. It was only a matter of time.

And time, and time … she didn’t have a working clock, but it seemed to her that she waited for at least an hour, maybe two. Long enough for the sun, already well along in the sky, to sink below the tops of the mountain behind Sumela. She retreated to the church in the rock where he had found her, trying to follow his example. But prayer eluded her. The evening chill had set in when he returned, and she could not see his face in the twilight.

“I must choose a narrow path between many errors,” he announced. “I cannot compel you, this is clear. I cannot surrender you to the authorities—they are unjust, and I do not know that they would succeed even if they were not. I know of no other with better judgment than myself to guide you. I would ask one of the ulema, but it is not safe. I know no imam, no mufti, I would trust so far.”

She nodded, motioning him to go on.

“This will be difficult, and dangerous,” he said, and started to pace back and forth. “But that is alâkasız, it is nothing. Duty does not depend on safety. This is the greater jihad, though you are an unbeliever.” He chopped the air with one hand as he said the words, as though he were not quite sure he believed them himself and needed a thorough convincing. He took a deep breath and faced her again. “But you will have your own duty in this.”

“What is it?”

“Will you agree to do nothing without my approval? Nothing involving your jinniyah, I mean? Or any other aggressive action, or threat?”

She thought it over. “Yes. Unless I am attacked. I’m not going to get shot while I ask for your opinion. Or if someone else is attacked right in front of me.”

“That is not aggressive.” He, too, had to think a moment. “Very well. It will do. If we agree, then … what has become of your brothers and sister?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t know how to find them.”

“It seems to me that this is our most urgent duty, to find the other children still in the hands of the Russians. So we may end their mistreatment, and the damage they may do, at the same time. The task is twice worth praise.”

“I’d like to find them, believe me, but I don’t know how.”

“I do not think we can. But we could, maybe, force them, or their masters, to find us?”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“No. It does not. It never does. You are young. You do not know how frightening it is, to be called to do right. But the call cannot be denied, once it is heard. To hear the call, to obey, this is true jihad—not the stupid business of stupid boys feeling big with their guns.” He paused. “This may not be done very quickly. We will need to leave this region. I will have to explain to my daughter, make excuses for neighbors.”

“Leave?” The thought struck her, again too late, that she was pulling this old man out of his comfortable retirement. But trying to backpedal now would only offend him, no matter how guilty she felt. “Where do you want to go?”

“Where we may do the greatest good, so they who seek evil will see. The east. Where Kurd fights Turk. If you fight here, if you help that woman’s husband, you may help him, but you will start a fight, and many more may be killed. Here, there is still a hope that things may become calm. Better to find where there is open trouble already, and seek to make peace.”

“You want to go right into a war?”

“Of course. You wanted different? To go and call your jinniyah, beat up the stupid boys with guns, walk off and laugh when they run, be a hero, no work? What is the use of that?”

“Well … “ Her heart sank, but she tried to persuade him anyway. “I wanted to start small.”

“You have more than started already. If you go to war, you should look to finish, and quickly. Delay means more suffering.” Another pause. She wished she could see his face. “Or have you changed your mind? Have you become sane? I can speak to my daughter, see if she can be your guardian. It is not too late.”

She wasn’t sure, now, that he wouldn’t be disappointed if she said yes. He had made up his mind again, and was prepared to follow through. But her giving in was out of the question now anyway. “East it is,” she said through gritted teeth, and he returned a solemn nod, extending a hand for her to shake.