Chapter 1: The Lone Quill
The Subtle One
there is no deity save Him, the Creator of everything:
worship, then, Him alone —
for it is He who has everything in His care.
No human vision can encompass Him,
whereas he encompasses all human vision:
for He alone is unfathomable, all-aware.”
-Al-An’am 6:101-3, tr. Asad
The name of the protagonist Abd al-Latif literally means ‘Slave-of the-Subtle One’.
Al-Latif, ‘the-Subtle One’ is one of the 99 names for God found in the Koran, and according to some Sufi [mystic]sects is ‘the most beautiful name’ for God as indicated in the passage above. Abd al-Latif would be addressed according to his full name by most. People who address him as al-Latif may be flattering him as virtuous and/or subtle.
After his morning prayer he emerged into the general study, on which his apartment bordered, and found Suleyman Ali gathered with three local men, all of whom he knew as doctors. There was a tension to their discussion, a tension which seemed to abate when he stepped into the room. There was Abdul Matin, Awn Al-Muzan, and Abyan Ibn-Musa. They all seemed relieved to see him.
As he approached, Suleyman spread his arms in greeting, and said, almost apologetically, “So glad to see you al-Latif. We are in need of your skills and diplomacy.”
He looked around and whispered, “Is it the famine?”
Abdul Matin grumbled, “Not to be precise, though it does factor.”
He noticed Uncle Ibis under the archway, waiting, he supposed, for his pass to the bazaar. He was feeling out of sorts; had for some reason picked up his quill and sheathed it behind the cord that bound Sina’s book. He looked at Ibis for a moment and, when he looked back to the others, two of his colleagues were already gone.
Suleyman Ali had his hand on his back and was directing him to a chair. “Are you well Abd al-Latif?”
“Yes, it is just the trance state that overtakes me when I read, and write and pray. I have been up since midnight pondering Sina.”
Suleyman called for a slave boy to bring coffee. Abdul Matin could not put off the worrisome subject of the conclave for another moment. He squatted down before him and implored, “You know I advise the veterinarians. Last night I oversaw a procedure that was disastrous. Please accompany me to the auction house. This is a mater that bears on the Sultan’s house. Please I beg of you Abd al-Latif. My credibility is at stake.”
Suleyman then handed him the coffee himself and took Sina’s scroll, handing it off to Uncle Ibis, who was now in the room.
‘Something is amiss. Take your coffee and then stand tall and strong in the light of God.’
He pretended to be pondering things that he lacked the focus to ponder, even as he sipped his drink, his second cup of the morning. They stood about him like pillars of thought, as he sipped, partaking of this enlivening drug. After a few long moments he stood, having drained his cup in silence, and then addressed his host, “Thank you, my apologies.”
He then turned to look up into Uncle Ibis’s black stone face, forever scarred after some savage custom of his tribe. “The bazaar must wait. Ready my donkey please.”
He then looked down into Abdul Matin’s plump dusky Berber face. “Where does your veterinarian keep his stalls.”
The Berber’s answer pined to the ceiling in his chirpy voice, “Behind the auction house doctor. I am most grateful and shall pay your fee out of my own purse.”
Within moments they were mounted upon their respective donkeys; Abd al-Latif led by Uncle Ibis, and Abdul Matin led by a skinny boy. There way was smoothed by Abdul’s Matin’s Turkish bodyguard, a large cruel man with a cudgel, who guided them aside to avoid the horseman, and knee-knocked and back-thumped the poor who obstructed their way. As they neared the auction house, down on the withered banks of their life-giving river, a rascally beggar stepped from a doorway asking alms and was brained for his trouble, left for dead with a split skull for coming too near men of means.
Within the hour they were wending their way through the filthy dung-reeking livestock pens behind the auction house. Uncle Ibis seemed somewhat in his element. The boy was as silent as a djinn. The brutal Turk swaggered to deter any malcontents that might be lurking. In time of famine one did not go lightly among beggars who might swarm a man of means and make off with his goods in order to pay for the increasingly expensive food that their starving bodies did crave.
They passed a starved skeletal boy—a black from the western lands beyond the Sahara, from the gold countries. He was in the final stage, was unlikely to be saved even in times of plenty. Guilt at his morning repast stung his chest. The snort of a beast behind the curtained pen they skirted—in a maze of curtained pens—brought an excuse to speak of his trade, his purpose in coming here. “Abdul Matin, what is the problem with the livestock?”
His colleague answered acidly, “The castrations did not go well.”
‘What fool could possibly botch a castration? Even the dirty Franks accomplish it on their mist shrouded estates across the Middle Sea. Why they gelded enough stallions to drag their reeking household goods across Turkey to take Antioch.’
He was, however, more diplomatic, more subtle, among men than in his mind. “What is the specific postoperative complaint?”
“Death from blood loss Doctor.”
“Were the beasts not watered before the procedure? In drought conditions a dried out body will expire from blood loss more quickly, as the blood volume is lessened.”
They then turned the corner of their canvas screened alley way above the cracked mud river banks, and his nose was assaulted with slaughterhouse smells. As Abdul Matin said, “Judge for yourself Doctor”, they entered into a vast tent of human carnage, for the beasts in question did not snort, had never snorted, for they were black boys, from nine to eleven years, laying in neat rows in deepening pools of blood.
‘Oh God!’
Abdul Matin narrated, as the two burly veterinarians stood by watching their charges bleed to death, “Usually we—they—lose one in ten from the blood loss accompanying the removal of the penis. But of the hundred here, we have but a handful still breathing.”
Uncle Ibis’ shoulder was stiff and cold when he leaned on it to let himself down from the donkey. Before the rows and rows of dead boys, having gushed blood from severed penis and testicle, only four boys lay delirious and suffering on a reed mat before them.
He was horrified and spared no pains to be subtle when he kneeled and checked their pulse and breath. “They were not properly watered, they are weak and malnourished—these two small ones will certainly perish. The fat boy—must have once been enormous—might have a hope, but not a prayer obviously. This tall well-built boy might live as well. Use hot wax to seal the hole you left for urination—which precaution would have saved all of these you donkey’s asses! Have them drink cinnamon tea exclusively, and in quantity.”
He rose in a fury, looking down over the boys, and across the rows of dead, as the hammer-fisted veterinarians began their belated waxing.
“Why so many at once?”
A fatalistic note sounded in his colleague’s voice, as if he now knew that he had lost professional standing with Abd al-Latif, a man regarded as one of Cairo’s leading visiting physician, “The slave-drivers let them go at a tenth of market as to avoid feeding them. It appears that they had been starved longer than indicated by the auctioneer.”
Abd al-Latif could not help but let a note of sarcasm creep into his voice, “As I myself have never been party to this grisly business I must plead ignorance. However, I did once remove a broken penis to avoid gangrenous infection. I made certain to reform the lower half as much as possible so that it might at least be used for urination. By Merciful God, these boys have vaginas now! Why take it out by the root?”
His friend was silent with detachment at this point, obviously a man who had looked upon this brand of death much before. His voice came as a hollow chirp, as if a tiny figurine spoke, “They are bound for the Sultan’s harim. The black penis is thought by women to have magical properties, and might be dallied with even if a mere stump remains.”
‘A heathen superstition—ah, but held by the Sultan, your benefactor…’
The detached depression was now overtaking him as well. His voice too sounded hollow and small. “I have not doctored eunuchs. How do they arrange for urination?”
“A quill is used to depressed the inverted flap.”
On impulse he drew his lone ink quill from the band that bound Sina’s book, a document he went on no medical call without, and placed it on the breast of the tall boy, the one most likely to survive. “You might inform this boy, when he gains his wits, that he will be honored to break the wax seal on his orifice with the quill of a noted healer. Perhaps it will aid his spirit of recovery. In any case, I have learned enough of Egyptian veterinarian medicine this day; a lesson I shall not need a notation to recall. Also, bathe the wound with the cinnamon tea, not river water, not if the Sultan is to own a new eunuch. My man and I will find our own way Abdul.”
He did not even think to mount, or wait for his slave to lead the way, but walked out of the tent ahead of him. He noticed, down the way by the river, a gang of rascals with hooks, ropes, nets and poles, lazing about. They numbered perhaps a dozen and seemed malicious. He did not like their look and stood and stared for some long moments.
After some time the donkey’s wet snout brushed his hand and Uncle Ibis’ talon-like hand came to rest on his shoulder. “Young Master, those are gravediggers, though they carry no pick, no shovel. There is evil about—the rats of famine, the vultures of men, they gather. Let us hasten up into the city, rank as it is.”
He could not look away from the leering faces of the rascals below. He did though, heed his servant’s advice, and begin the trek back to Suleyman Ali’s house; a house that would never again seem so fine as before; never to feel so welcome as it once had.
