The Black Madonna Read Online Free PDF Page B

wrinkled his nose slightly. At least some things got done properly.
    He was angry, although you would not have known it. He made a point of repressing outward signs of emotion, except when they were needed for particular effect. They were to be used sparingly, to be appreciated all the more because of the rarity of their appearance. He refused to express emotion when he was on his own. Just as he refused to tolerate weakness, incompetence or treachery in others.
    But then tolerance was not something those who knew him well would ever have accused him of. There were many, many, willing to lay down their lives for him, many more who regarded him as a holy man. That was not a claim he made for himself. He considered himself devout, in his own way, but more than anything else he was a pragmatist, a believer in the power of the possible: that anything was possible, if you wanted it badly enough. And would let nothing stand in your way.
    He had never let anything stand in his way. Not since he had been a child in the dust of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, growing up to loath the man who had murdered his parents, and rejoicing when the hated dictator went to the gallows. But he had also quickly come to despise those who had deposed Saddam, then ground the ruins of his country to dust to satisfy their oil lust and impose their so-called democracy.
    He had grown up in Samarra, the city of the two shrines of the tenth and eleventh imams, second city in the province of Salah ad-Din. The name was that of the great twelfth-century warrior whohad expelled the crusaders from Palestine but it also meant ‘ rightness of religion’. The heathen Saddam had tried to usurp that name for himself. How much more fitting that instead he had inherited it amongst his followers, a name that he hoped would one day yet again echo in history.
    All things were achieved only by God’s blessing, but also by the will of man, doing His work. That was what would be remembered in history. Yet sometimes artefacts from history could also make an impact on the present: artefacts such as the one that lay on the table in front of him in the place of the box of bloodstained surgical instruments.
    The man they called Saladin sneered at the supposedly sacred image in front of him. He was familiar with the dolls and baubles of the idolatrous but still could not suppress an instinctive revulsion in their presence. He paced slowly around it, examining the quality of the workmanship, which was competent if unremarkable; this was not an object whose value relied on its artistic merits. Nor was it made of valuable material, or richly adorned. It was precious for what people believed it to be, it was an idol pure and simple. A fetish. A work of the devil.
    There was no God but God – even the Christians claimed to believe this, they were like the Jews had once been, people of the Book, children of Ibrahim. Yet they had committed the ultimate blasphemy, the one which Mohammed himself (peace be upon him) had foreseen. He had forbidden the creation of any image or likeness of himself, whereas they had confused a prophet with the deity, and made images of his martyrdom to worship. Images of their man/god hanging on a cross, rightful worship of the one God surrounded by pagan rituals. And then this most absurd of fantasies, to take Miriam, mother of their minor prophet, exalt her to the status of ‘Mother of God’, to make images of her and worship her too. And these – these idolatrous crusaders – dared to claim the high moral ground for themselves and deride the children of Islam as infidel barbarians.
    He reached out his hand, reluctantly, and ran it across the figure on the table. It was a simple piece of wood that had once been coloured . There were little more than traces of the original pigment still adhering to the surface: a hint of palest blue here, presumably to indicate robes of some sort, white here – a trim perhaps, it was hard to be sure.
    And black of course. On