The Satanic Verses

to Heaven?’ he asked in a piteous voice; she shrugged. ‘Bullocks have no souls,’ she said coolly, ‘and it is souls we march to save.’ Osman looked at her and realized he no longer loved her. ‘You’ve become a demon,’ he told her in disgust.
    ‘I am nothing,’ Ayesha said. ‘I am a messenger.’
    ‘Then tell me why your God is so anxious to destroy the innocent,’ Osman raged. ‘What’s he afraid of? Is he so unconfident that he needs us to die to prove our love?’
    As though in response to such blasphemy, Ayesha imposed even stricter disciplinary measures, insisting that all pilgrims say all five prayers, and decreeing that Fridays would be days of fasting. By the end of the sixth week she had forced the marchers to leave four more bodies where they fell: two old men, one old woman,and one six-year-old girl. The pilgrims marched on, turning their backs on the dead; behind them, however, Mirza Saeed Akhtar gathered up the bodies and made sure they received a decent burial. In this he was assisted by the Sarpanch, Muhammad Din, and the former untouchable, Osman. On such days they would fall quite a way behind the march, but a Mercedes-Benz station wagon doesn’t take long to catch up with over a hundred and forty men, women and children walking wearily towards the sea.

    The dead grew in number, and the groups of unsettled pilgrims around the Mercedes got larger night by night. Mirza Saeed began to tell them stories. He told them about lemmings, and how the enchantress Circe turned men into pigs; he told, too, the story of a pipe-player who lured a town’s children into a mountain-crack. When he had told this tale in their own language he recited verses in English, so that they could listen to the music of the poetry even though they didn’t understand the words. ‘Hamelin town’s in Brunswick,’ he began. ‘Near famous Hanover City. The River Weser, deep and wide, washes its walls on the southern side …’
    Now he had the satisfaction of seeing the girl Ayesha advance, looking furious, while the butterflies glowed like the campfire behind her, making it appear as though flames were streaming from her body.
    ‘Those who listen to the Devil’s verses, spoken in the Devil’s tongue,’ she cried, ‘will go to the Devil in the end.’
    ‘It’s a choice, then,’ Mirza Saeed answered her, ‘between the devil and the deep blue sea.’

    Eight weeks had passed, and relations between Mirza Saeed and his wife Mishal had so deteriorated that they were no longer on speaking terms. By now, and in spite of the cancer that had turned her as grey as funeral ash, Mishal had become Ayesha’s chief lieutenant and most devoted disciple. The doubts of other marchershad only strengthened her own faith, and for these doubts she unequivocally blamed her husband.
    ‘Also,’ she had rebuked him in their last conversation, ‘there is no warmth in you any more. I feel afraid to approach.’
    ‘No warmth?’ he yelled. ‘How can you say it? No warmth? For whom did I come running on this damnfool pilgrimage? To look after whom? Because I love whom? Because I am so worried about, so sad about, so filled with misery about whom? No warmth? Are you a stranger? How can you say such a thing?’
    ‘Listen to yourself,’ she said in a voice which had begun to fade into a kind of smokiness, an opacity. ‘Always anger. Cold anger, icy, like a fort.’
    ‘This isn’t anger,’ he bellowed. ‘This is anxiety, unhappiness, wretchedness, injury, pain. Where can you hear anger?’
    ‘I hear it,’ she said. ‘Everyone can hear, for miles around.’
    ‘Come with me,’ he begged her. ‘I’ll take you to the top clinics in Europe, Canada, the USA. Trust in Western technology. They can do marvels. You always liked gadgets, too.’
    ‘I am going on a pilgrimage to Mecca,’ she said, and turned away.
    ‘You damn stupid bitch,’ he roared at her back. ‘Just because you’re going to die doesn’t mean you have to take all these people with you.’ But she walked away across the roadside camp-site, never looking back; and now that he’d proved her point by losing control and speaking the unspeakable he fell to his knees and wept. After that quarrel Mishal refused to sleep beside him any more. She and her mother rolled out their bedding next to the butterfly-shrouded prophetess of their Meccan quest.
    By day, Mishal worked ceaselessly among the pilgrims, reassuring them, bolstering their faith, gathering