Ibn Zakarya studied the movement of the heavens. From an early age, he astounded others with his mathematical prowess. After a brief career that raised dark suspicions at the House of Wisdom, the fabled ancient academy in Baghdad, he withdrew to the shadows of a remote caravanserai in his home province. By then, he was afraid even of singing birds.
 
Ibn Zakarya was born in the western mountains of Persia, when silk merchants from the east still plied their trade. Even as a half-naked child playing in a dust, he proved himself a prodigy, scratching the shape of the moon in the yellow earth. He drew the earth and sun, then creased his brow and scuffed his foot over the markings. Within a few hours, the child showed others in the village how the mysterious silver body in the sky started as a scimitar, then over the month widened and bulged. And then it drew back again, a deadly blade sheathed in darkness. He had completed the full lunar cycle. 
 
The villagers stared. “Impossible,” said one.
 
“A trick,” said another.
 
A few years later, the summer before a blue smudge of whiskers appeared on the adolescent’s chin, a caravan laden with wares stopped in his mountain village. The pilgrims brought rich spices, bright cloth, strange coins, and impossible tales. They sang and shouted while their camels cropped the sparse foliage. A fat merchant was the leader. He traded Ibn Zakarya a shred of paper for a toy that the boy explained would help the caravan cross the desert, a notched plank with a straw for a sight and weighted thread for plumbness. The caravanner blustered, claiming the scrap was worth much more than the toy, because it was from a precious manuscript by a sage of mathematics in Baghdad. But he released a heavy sigh and said, as a kindness to the child, he would settle anyway.
 
Ibn Zakarya, who was illiterate then, stood goggle-eyed at the gift, the braying camels falling silent in his ears. Wild calligraphy wound across the page like a serpent over the desert floor. He knew, then—he knew in his heart what he would do with his life.
 
A few more summers passed, and from the mysterious paper, Ibn Zakarya taught himself simple reading. But his scope was limited to the figures on the page, and he yearned for more. Finally, another train of camels visited the remote village. This time, Ibn Zakarya contracted himself into servitude to get to Baghdad, his goal being to become a footman in the House of Wisdom. Perhaps then, he could wheedle his way into an education, for, being a peasant, he had no money.
 
The villagers were glad to be rid of him. “A lunatic in the in the making,” said one village elder. 
 
“An apostate in the making,” said another.
 
Ibn Zakarya presented himself at the servant entrance of the magnificent institution. He was eager to set his eyes upon books and wander the cool halls among gaggles of the wise while discussing matters of universal importance. But for month upon month, the only tasks Ibn Zakarya did were menial. Clean stalls, water animals, grind grain. Bored by his duties, he again started scratching in the dirt, returning to his old conundrum describing the movements of the moon and the earth and the sun. He developed a model in which a small circle rotates inside a larger circle, twice the diameter of the small circle. Unlike others that The House of Wisdom, he believed the orbit of the inner circle was symmetrical; it did not swing around in elastic forays. He had worked out that the rotation of the moon around the earth, was fixed. 
 
That evening, a fellow stable hand snitched on his dawdling to their supervisor, who related the anecdote at supper. By the miracle of gossip, a young instructor made his way to the stable to see the curiosity. 
 
The instructor frowned. “What is this?” 
 
Ibn Zakarya’s black eyes flashed as he elaborated on the curves and lines.
 
“From a stable boy!” the instructor snorted.
 
Humbled, the youth snuck among the sacred books when not laboring among beasts, listening to wise men talk about what they read. This way, he gained the art of letters and numbers enough to estimate the circumference of the earth and dabble in the procession of apogees. In time, Ibn Zakarya constructed a device of disks made from stolen kitchen dishes, a device more complex than the toy the merchant had connived to possess. 
 
On her way back to the kitchen, a slave-girl spied the youth. She asked, “But why do make this?” 
 
Etching a fine arc on a silver pate, Ibn Zakarya, who was growing into a handsome youth, replied, “So mariners at sea will always know where they are.”
 
“Are you going to sea? Will you take me?”
 
“I am not going to sea.”
 
As the slave-girl was favored by the captain of the guardsmen, rumor performed its wonder again. Word spread. One afternoon, Al-Tugrai, the ancient mathematician the youth suspected was the author of his prized fragment, appeared in the courtyard where the youth was sweeping. The doddering old man meandered, step-by-step, increasing the distance of his path by half. Still in awe of the old man, however, and fearful of punishment, Ibn Zakarya fell with his palms to the terrace floor. 

“Boy, show me your navigational device,” Al-Tugrai croaked.
 
The youth sped to the palate of straw that was his bed, unearthed the silver device, and streaked back through the halls. The scholar, sallow and hunched, studied the plates. Fingering a bent rod, he said, “An astrolabe. Crude. This is the rule?”
 
“Yes, master.”
 
The old man inquired again, tapping his dry fingernail on what once had been a spoon. “And this is the alidade?”
 
Ibn Zakarya nodded.
 
“And why did you make this apparatus instead of tending to your chores?” 
 
The youth considered his answer this time, reflecting on the difficulties he suffered from his earlier replies. “So that true believers will be assured fidelity to the faith.” Ibn Zakarya then explained the complex order of the discs, delighting over its mechanism. “With this instrument, the faithful will always know the time of day and the correct direction of Mecca.”
 
Al-Tugrai slipped the device into the folds of his robe. With a grunt, he turned away.
 
“Master,” Ibn Zakarya cried, then produced the cherished scrap from his tunic. The old mathematician paused so that the youth could deliver the paper to him. The sage carefully unrolled the sheet. 
 
“It is from a long unfinished work of mine, a critical page stolen by some bandit-merchant. Without it, I have been wandering forever like the planets through the night sky. Thank you. Now I can finish my calculations.”
 
The young man lowered his sparking eyes. “Master, the planets do not wander.”
 
The old man stared at Ibn Zakarya. His voice cracked, as if he saw a conclusion descending like an eagle over the steppe. “Boy, you must study not only the heavens, but all of mathematics, and philosophy, logic, music, and optics.”
 
Under the scholar’s tutelage, the new pupil made rapid progress with the instrument. Of course, when it was done, the master claimed the glory, and Ibn Zakarya accepted the trade-off: he had finally entered the House of Wisdom.
 
Within the year, however, Al-Tugrai died from a wasting illness that had long haunted him. To abate his mourning—or perhaps to put it quietly on display—Ibn Zakarya found refuge in the library. Secluded there, he produced a treatise identifying more than a dozen problems with Ptolemy’s system of the planets. He unearthed scrolls attributed to the Babylonians whose celestial insights, though rudimentary, were revelatory. He criticized Plato and devoured Aristotle, and meditated on possibility and impossibility. Returning from self-exile among the texts, Ibn Zakarya was accepted now as a colleague among colleagues.
 
Immediately, other things changed, too. Volumes others found impossible to decipher opened their secrets to him. He devised a method to track the journey of the spirit from flesh as it escaped the world. He studied the distillation of elixirs, and the language of birds. However, when he shared his ideas with his follow scholars, he encountered only abrasive laughter.
 
Alone in his cell after a heated debate in the courtyard, Ibn Zakarya fingered a tract on astrology, a suspicious science, but it was by the deceased Al-Tugrai. It explained that astrology and astronomy were sister sciences. Although he loved tallying calculations, the occult was another matter. Yet why not? His master had trod there, and nothing seemed closed to him intellectually. The men of the academy were as ignorant as the peasants in his village. 
 
A year of isolation in the academy followed. No one spoke to him other than to address life’s essentials, for he was no longer welcome at the scholars’ table. At a certain point, he was ejected from his cell and sent back to the stables and told to work for his keep.
 
And on the last day of his year of renewed servitude, Ibn Zakarya conceived of his greatest project. He declared, if only to the camels of the stable, that he would create a different, more magnificent invention; a speculum for the skies. It would predict not only the paths of the heavens, but influence the fates of men, too. 
 
However, to do that, he would need insights of dangerous scope. 
 
Ibn Zakarya removed his master’s mystic book from the library. He read it deeply, drinking in its mysteries. He helped himself to a brass plate with a lively reddish color from the blacksmith’s stall. Then, he fashioned dials from the brass, a backing frame, and a geared calendar with nineteen wheels. All this he overlaid with the constellations of Ptolemy, corrected, of course, and laid down with lines of gold and silver wire. Last, he superimposed quadrants for helical and cosmic cycles; and carved otherworldly inscriptions and tokens of the zodiac.
 
The work took the entire winter season. Ibn Zakarya barely left the stable during that time, eating the same fodder as the beasts. Finally, the instrument was complete. He laid the new device at the foot of the stable door to admire, as it gleamed in the sunlight. Unexpectedly, a white vulture landed at the stable door. Ibn Zakarya stepped back, startled. The white vulture twisted its long neck; the tufts of its chest feathers shivered.
 
In a burst, the strange bird snapped up the device and flew to the edge of the compound, where it landed and cast it into the dust. 
 
“An evil omen!” Ibn Zakarya cried.
 
The portentous bird flew off in a storm of shrieks. Ibn Zakarya seized the broken device and raced back to the stable. Bending over the dials, he saw how badly damaged his work was by the horny beak. The calendar gears were destroyed, the inscriptions obliterated. As he feared, the wonderful device was deeply damaged, perhaps beyond repair. 
 
He slammed his fist on the earth. He would make it again, yet better and more powerful!
 
On an evening distinguished by a ring of fire around the moon, Ibn Zakarya sat before his divine creation. Of course, he timed the completion of his repairs to coincide with this strange lunar event. All was ready to test. On the first day of his experiment, shortly after certain turns of the nineteen wheels, Ibn Zakarya heard cursing from the courtyard. Two cooks stabbed each other with knives, defiling the cookhouse with their blood. On the second day, the young scholar who had abused his early invention broke a tooth, which bulged with puss; he was dead before the afternoon prayers. With the morning of the third day, the slave girls of the academy began to hang themselves, one by one. Ibn Zakarya listened to the hoarse choking; followed by the tinkling of rings, bracelets, and anklets from the bodies dangling from beams. At nightfall, all the girl’s corpses were laid out, and the mourners began their wailing.
 
Clearly, his device worked, and Ibn Zakarya vowed to free himself from the academy. He knew at some point he would come under suspicion. So, he stole away from the House of Wisdom, his face veiled with a headscarf.
 
The journey home seemed endless. His feet hurt and his hands swelled. His forearms grew white as powdered lead; the scarf grew stiff with filth, chaffing his neck so that thin rivulets of blood ran over his chest. A dry cough wracked him. The white vulture was constantly circling overhead. 
 
Other lesions followed, covering his body, but Ibn Zakarya slogged on, every gesture scorched with pain. Certain he had succumbed to a delirium, he saw, as if in a dream, enormous columns of men dressed in quilted leather approaching from the direction of his village. An army, though none like he had ever seen. Archers with bows and quivers of arrows, while others bore axes and a sort of pike. They rode with purpose, their chain mail rattling. After them came the immense siege machines, catapults and rolling crossbows the width of two prone men. 
 
Ibn Zakarya wished the army to lay scourge upon the House of Wisdom—that it should burn and all its books be reduced to ash. He scrapped borax crystals from the dirt, an essential ingredient for sorcery according to the occult book of his master; and unwrapped his mechanism. He lighted incense and murmured incantations as he rubbed the borax on the device fortify its power. But the incense sparked and ignited the crystals; the air burst red. Within moments, the exploded devise lay flaming like an ember from a furnace. 
 
Ibn Zakarya drooled from his bleeding lips, weeping over the lump of useless brass smoldering among the rocks. And had his spell even worked?
 
The vast concourse of soldiers swiftly covered an incredible distance, receding in huge swells to the western horizon. The white vulture fell upon a corpse dumped before the column had fully disappeared. Only then did Ibn Zakarya see that the trammeled warpath bent toward Baghdad. 
 
Time grew scattered for Ibn Zacharia; his village loomed. From the distance, however, he was disquieted. Smoke rose in a thin line from battered buildings and people lay prone on the ground, unmoving. A stiff wind trailed down the river and marsh birds flitted among the reeds, although their songs were like the croaking of demons to him. Ibn Zakarya knelt over a pool of water to clean himself. He carefully unwrapped the scarf that had walled in the swollen flesh of weeks, and recoiled at his reflection: the white skin, the stiff, thickened tissue, and ulcers, a face mottled as the moon. He knew the color of plague. 
 
An abandoned caravanserai sits at the foot of the western mountains of Persia. After the siege of Baghdad, and the burning of the House of Wisdom and all its books by a strange, viscous army, no one passes by it anymore. Wind gathers sand over the broken terraces, now inhabited by a ghoul. The ghoul is small and crooked, and scrawls arcs and incompressible signs on the walls, figures of geomancy, surely, although one cannot be sure. Someday the scrawling may cease. For now, the mad language only increases, month upon month, according to the waxing of the moon. At night, the ghoul can be heard weeping.
 
Author’s Note: In 1258 CE, the city of Baghdad was attacked by an army under the direction of Halagu Khan, brother of Genghis Khan. Its renowned academy and famed library were destroyed, if they ever existed. 
 
 
© Vic Peterson 2025