Chapter 3: Fisherman of Tennis
-Tale of the Ten Princes, A. D. 1200
January, 1201, The Tantic Nile
The breeze had always been fine on the first day of Aquarius. There was something fetid though, about this particular breeze. One normally glided downriver to the Breaks of Damietta with ease, skimming the water alongside his fellow fishermen, all in their own craft, one’s boys manning the nets.
His boys were gone; fled upriver to Cairo the second month into the famine.
His fellow fishermen were gone; unable to fill their nets with ought but corrupt victims of the fish plague.
And today, if one were to cast a net, he would surely haul back a human corpse, as they floated by down the sluggish Nile in increasing numbers. He was increasingly doubtful that he had chosen wisely when he permitted his mother and wife to take the children to Cairo. This had been the way of it. No outlying farms or villages had remained habitable. The men of means remained in Tennis, though the traders' barges no longer came up from Damietta. Of those who eked a living from the Nile, only he remained. The very reeds upon the banks bent, sawed together in the breeze, and seemed to weep for their plight.
He had set off at dawn for the cleaner waters of the breaks. He was drawn to the marsh like a water bird, wanting nothing more than to wash his dirty turban in clean water as he smelled the salt breeze of the Middle Sea kissing the land. He would venture beyond the Breaks into the bay and net some clean sea fish, and then eat himself a fish who knows the protection of the salt water from this terrible corruption.
He was now a few hours into his journey, racing before the wind to stay ahead of the bodies that followed him downriver. Now among the thick papyrus of the upper Tantric Nile he began to smell life again. If he caught no sea fish he would harvest papyrus for the bookmakers. A whiskered tern perched on a wilted cane and regarded him like an ancient animal god of the infidels. Its gaze shook him.
Could it be their vengeance upon those who have submitted to God?
You blaspheme in your mind fool!
God’s men, it is known, came on horse. We fishermen, Grandfather said, have always lived thus. Therefore our ancestors were infidels, animal worshipping heathens! Grandfather spoke of The Lion of the Sand—has the ancient heathen devil risen?
Cold chills wracked his gaunt body as he forced these blasphemous thoughts from his mind.
He reclined in the stern and manned his simple rudder oar; a tool Grandfather had assured him in his youth had remained the same since the untamed dawn of the world, when man had spoken to beast, before God’s Realm had been established by The Prophet. Some floating bodies he overtook, never looking too closely, dreading that they might belong to his family. He was well into the banks of cane and the scent of the breeze had improved. He was beginning to feel like a fisherman again, like a man who scudded across the face of the world untangled by the corruption of rulers, weird women, and horsemen.
Blessed are the Children of the Mighty Nile Grandfather. I remember your words; your small prophecies that more regard for the ways of horsemen and less regard for the Nile would one day bring its un-giving wrath, its keeping of life in the mountains at the bottom of the world whence it is born.
As if in response to his silent meeting of the mind with his elder—the man who had raised him while Father slaved behind a shield for the Sultan’s Horsemen, only to be lost to the wicked Franks up in Syria—a wind tune greeted his ears. The song was at first something of a whistling gust; then came to him as the rhythm of a soft breeze scouring stones out beyond the green; as if the desert wind itself stalked up the river as a piper between the banks of thick cane.
He looked ahead to the bend in the Nile, where it narrowed a bit and the cane spread thickly on the bar between the river arms, to see a flock of little gulls. He had seen precious few gulls since December, as he supposed they were downriver in the marsh before the Breaks feasting on the dead fish and diseased humans who had been washed there by the uncaring river.
The song was not unlike the flute play of the dervish called fakir who sometimes tamed snakes in the Indian fashion as they pursued their lifelong pilgrimage in poverty. The sound beckoned him and he unfurled his sail completely, urgent to see the miracle that must surely be the origin of this sound.
Grandfather, might it be The Lion of the Sand come to redress the imbalance of the river? Would not that be wonderful for me to see?
In less than a half hour the song was now clearly a song, a tune played by a man’s hand, not some trick of the wind. He had often cut papyrus stalks and made flutes for himself. It was common among the fishermen to try and woo the fish into their nets. He had never become much of a piper. He did know piping when he heard it.
Something knocked against the hull of the boat. He looked down and saw that it was the body of an elder, an aged peasant of the starving class that he had seen float downriver for a month now. But this body, although wasted, pecked by vultures, with pale skin sloughing away, swam, if in some mad parody of the act. It seemed to be eager to get ahead, to find the source of the song.
Oh Merciful God forgive my blasphemies and save me!
He took the boat to the east bank and ran it into the bank in the shade of some looming reeds. He took down the sail and reached up to gather the reeds more closely about the boat. Every call of the unseen pipe seemed to send chills coursing through his veins as he worked. In a few brief moments he felt himself obscured enough and then huddled down among the nets shivering behind the boards that he had fitted with his own hand. There was oddly some comfort in that.
In some moments, moments that passed as if hours, he saw, beneath a flock of attending gulls, a raft of sorts. The nature of this craft was so infernal as to confuse the mind. It took some moments for him to ascertain that this raft was a floating mass of tangled human bodies, poled slowly upriver by two hideous beings—Franks from hell it seemed. Two Frankish horseman in their murder cloaks, marked with the cross of vile judgment, stood, faces rotting in the sun, sockets hollow; barren of eyes. A gull sat on the rusty armor of one’s shoulder, pecking at the hanging remnants of an ear. The dead things, seemingly imbued with some supernatural might, poled on, dragging the mass of some dozens of tangled bodies against the current of the mighty river.
Has this horror crept up from the pits of hell in answer to my consideration of the old gods? Am I twice damned?
No answer echoed from his wracked mind. For, as his eyes took in the totality of the damned raft it was all he could do to grasp the sight and place its aspects in his mind’s eye—an unconscious act that he would forever regret, as this simple fisherman of Tennis would never sleep a sound night again, no matter how exhausted he might be.
The Raft of the Damned had its dead pole men, had its deck of twisted wasted bodies, and had a new and eager plank in the form of the lurching swimmer that clawed its way into the mass and burrowed like a worm—breaking its own rotting bones in the process—into the floating mass of corruption.
Yet that was not the horror of it. The horrible realization that hell had vomited up some vile thing to stalk the earth was evidenced by the fact that this raft had a captain. Sitting cross-legged in the center of the mass of tangled floating dead was, or what appeared at first glance to be, a fakir; the very piping dervish he had imagined as the source of the haunting wind song. This dervish was small, big-headed, black as a man of the Sudan, with hands and feet the size of a normal man. Instead of robes he wore flayed human skins. In place of a turban he wore the wound tresses of women—young and old—wrapped about his head.
Worst of all, the pipe song was similar to that which he had heard played in the marketplace at Cairo when a boy, when he had been amazed at how the Indian fakirs had made serpents dance to the tune of their pipes. Grandfather had said that this power to woo serpents was a reflection of the fact that the poor Indian fakir had not lost sight of the fact that man and beast shared common origins, and that the animal gods had once spoken to men in old times.
What then, Grandfather, is the meaning of this?
As he peeked slack-jawed above the rim of the boat like a boy sneaking a look at the evil that adults do, he at first believed that the raft of bodies was alive with snakes dancing to the tune of the Black Fakir. This, however, was not so. For the serpents of the damned that danced for this piper—who piped, not upon a reed, but upon a human leg bone—were in fact the broken many-elbowed arms of those corpses that comprised the raft itself; a dozen dead dancing hands reaching for a sky that would hopefully not have them.
