Part 1: The Black Horseman
Chapter 4: Enter The Sign Of Aires

“Human skulls, white as cranes, rolled on the ground.”
-Tale of Ten Princes, A.D. 1200

March, 1201, Cairo

The sound of his own scratching quill, inking his learned thoughts as words for posterity—if a posterity would be permitted—soothed him more than the cool breeze wafting up from the dying river; more than the chirp of the sparrow at his window who sought refuge from the coming of the ravening crows…

“As the wise Sina long ago implored, ‘Moderation in all things do prescribe for any patient whose health shall be cultivated against the harsh buffeting of the world.’ I, in my own experience…have slept not near enough…”

He woke to the fussing of Little Ibrahm, the bustling Jew boy that Uncle Ibis had purchased for him under the auspices of Aquarius. He felt his head being lifted and drool being dabbed from his chin by the kind little hand of his pet Jew—his personal favorite from among the entire damned race of them.

‘What, Oh Merciful God, were you thinking when you set store with their kind? Ah, you were young—if almighty—the world barely formed. But this one, perhaps you have permitted to retain the ancestral nobility of their kind that once enabled Moses to best the Pharaoh?’

The young voice was raspy with urgency, ‘Master, please raise—oh no!’

His head rolled off the little hand that was supporting it as the other dabbed at his chin, and smacked face first into the cedar plank that formed the top of his desk. Light sparked behind his eyes as his nose burst and gushed blood across—‘My scroll!’

Abd al-Latif sat back with a start and felt the blood from his nose roll down over his chin. Through his teary-eyed haze he could see little Ibrahm bustling about the desk, dabbing at the scroll, rolling it up, and wiping the desk with his very own robe. His voice was cracking with anxiety even as his master sat dizzily half-conscious upon his padded high back chair a mere foot away—a chair gifted him by Sulyman Ali, as he was known to doze off at his desk. The crackling voice of Little Ibrahm muttered, “So sorry Master! So sorry I am! A kind master you are. I sought only to clean you up for the audience—they shall arrive at sun up and it is already dawn!”

As he opened his mouth he tasted blood—‘Oh no, I am becoming a bleeder. I am afflicted!’

“Ibrahm, who is coming?”

“The Municipal Health Advisor to the Commandant of Cairo, Master, comes to engage you in discussion. You know him, Awn al-Muzan, the Fat Yemeni; the one who cannot count you say, and has the manners of a goat you say.”

“Ibrahm you must never repeat my opinions concerning my colleagues. It could be dangerous for you and dare I say embarrassing for myself. Oh, my blood is too rich with iron. I taste all wrong boy. I am having trouble seeing. Can you read from Sina’s dietary notes please.”

The boy was now wiping at his chin again. “Nonsense Master, this is not but half your nose blood running into your mouth. I found you passed out—”

“Do you presume to practice medicine Young Jew of Mine? Do you accuse me of epilepsy? I experienced no seizure.”

The strong, but tiny, little hands steadied his face as Ibrahm’s nine-year-old features came into focus—such an ugly bright-eyed face his was. The smile was somewhat hurt by Abd al-Latif’s rash comments. He felt himself becoming bestial to his servants of late, as his mind was failing his quill in the matter of elucidation of medical thought and he was grown bitter within.

‘It must be the effects of remaining indoors for such an unnatural long time.’

The boy’s voice was composed though, “Master, you fell asleep at your desk and lay face first in your Malabar ink. Your chin and lips are as dark as those of Uncle Ibis. I did not want you embarrassed before the Fat One.”

“Shush about my overweight colleague. Thank you, and my apology concerning the disparaging reference to you in terms of your wretched race. You are far better a boy than should grow into Jewhood. I will see to your submission-to-God someday so that you might ply your intellectual gifts as a free untaxed man.”

“Thank you Master. I would take up your faith, only if your name and professional standing came with it.”

He sat as his boy servant dabbed at his chin and lips, leaving him to retreat into his mind.

‘I should have married and had a child, a son. Here I sit, contemplating the adoption of this scheming little creature simply to assure the extension of my life’s work. Ah, but his would be another soul brought before All Merciful God. Compose yourself Subtle Pilgrim, prepare for the day’s work.’

Awn al-Muzan stood, somehow still corpulent after six months of famine, before him.

‘God save the donkey who draws that lot of a load!’

Abd al-Latif sucked in his own slight paunch visible only after the morning’s repast at Sulyman Ali’s table. Uncle Ibis, towering above him, noticed this with a sly smirk at the corner of the mouth, and intoned dutifully, “Shall I assist in the mounting Young Master?”

Awn al-Muzan, fairly coughed in his crude Yemeni accent, “Yes Old Ibis Boy, I shall take a hand.”

‘Or two, you fat hippopotamus!’

Ibis walked over to the man who stood half his height and scaled twice his weight, grabbed him under the arm pits in as dignified a manner as possible, as Awn al-Muzan’s own overworked donkey boys both breathed a sigh of relief and steadied the hapless spare donkey to receive its charge. With what seemed an impossible ease Ibis lifted The Fat One high into the saddle as the donkey complained. Awn al-Muzan went nowhere without his donkey boys, the smaller of whom always led a spare donkey for the return trip.

Awn al-Muzan then thumped the official pendent hanging beneath his luxuriant beard and pompously declared, “As Advisor to the Commandant of Cairo, I scarcely require a guard. However Honored al-Latif if you might do me the favor of bringing Old Ibis Boy along I would appreciate the gesture. When my own wretched donkey boys heave me from the saddle it is not nearly so dignified a process, and irritates my hemorrhoids as well.”

‘If you were slim enough to properly clean your rear parts you might not be in such discomfort!’

So Abd al-Latif thought, though he spoke more diplomatically. “Of course Grand Advisor. I go nowhere without trusty Uncle Ibis, who it seems goes everywhere without me. I do not, after all, cast quite so ominous a shadow upon the groveling multitude as does your eminent self.”

Little Ibrahm then darted forward and blurted, “Might I accompany you Master? Might I?”

Awn al-Muzan scowled darkly at the suggestion. Secretly despising this fool, and knowing that he could read only Arabic despite being a wealthy bookseller, Abd al-Latif decided to rub some salt into that gaping semi-literate wound. “Grand Advisor, my little Jew boy here reads Aramaic, Coptic, Greek, Farsi, the blaspheming script of the popes, and even the pig language of the Castilians, fluently. Not to mention his facility with his own Hebrew. I have decided to employ him as my secretary and scribe.”

Awn al-Muzan nodded tolerantly, to Abd al-Latif and then, noticing that the boy had presumptuously brought a scribe’s travel case, scowled again. Uncle Ibis smoothed things over by cuffing the boy across the ear and shoving him at the reins of Abd al-Latif’s own mount. As Ibis hefted him—much to his irritation—into the saddle, Abd al-Latif noticed that his Ethiopian man servant wore a dagger in his girdle and had a saber belted on his hip. It was now Abd al-Latif’s turn to scowl.

By way of answer Ibis took the reins—standing as tall as Abd al-Latif sat in the saddle—of the donkey roughly from the boy and turned the beast into the lead toward the courtyard gate guarded by two of Sulyman Ali’s mailed men. The Ethiopian warrior slave snarled under his breath, “By you leave Young Master. I know this is a scholarly visit. However, as you have sat for the last quarter of the dead year in the shadows of your candlelit study, I have been plying the streets in service to your host, whose very bully boys decline to run errands about town except in a group. Prepare yourself Young Master. The city of our host is no longer a candlelit world.”

Noticing that little Ibrahm was listening intently Ibis flicked his tawny little head with the tips of his long fingers, which caused an echoing ‘clonk’ sound and elicited a yelp of pain from the little busybody.

As they filed out through the gate Abd al-Latif looked out over the lower reaches of the city, which was normally obscured from his view, with his apartment facing the desert. A thick crust of cloud seemed to cover the skyline, and smudge the minarets of mosques and the castellated roofs of wealthy households. He did shudder at the sight.

Ibis handed him a dainty cloth soaked in myrrh oil and remarked, “When we pass the tower at the foot of the Street of Masons use it.”

He looked behind him and noticed, filing through the gate, the obese form of Awn al-Muzan, whose donkey drover used an oiled cloth fan to whisk away the air before his mouth and nose, all the while leading the beast with the other hand. The assistant to this drover led the now fatigued beast on which the Municipal Health Advisor—a dimwit who brought shame on the profession of Hippocrates, and was only included among the ranks of learned doctors due to his vast collection of medical and apothecary books—had arrived at the House of Sulyman Ali.

‘Oh Merciful God, though I have been a coward taking private observances in my indulgent host’s own mosque, please permit my rise to redemption as I face this cruel world.’

He had thought to question Awn al-Muzan on the way to the Commandant’s duty house. The stench had rendered conversation out of the question. He held fast to his oiled cloth and breathed only through the nose, lest he imbibe the pestilence that was in the air. He had seen only patients of the wealthiest classes in his apartment since that terrible day when he had journeyed forth to the cattle pens to observe the carnage among the castrated black boys. He had cursed himself a coward nightly, and had apologized to All Merciful God with his every praying breath.

A mangy dog darted out from behind an overturned barrel with a foot—a human foot—dangling from its jaws. Quicker than the eye could see Ibis’s saber licked out like the tongue of judgment and slashed the terrible little beast in half. It did not however remove the chewed human foot from the mouth.

Had he not been a physician he would have swooned at the sight. Death, however, had become his grim bedfellow over the years. He had looked into its eyes often. Plague was whispered to have come to the streets. He advised his patients to stay indoors, and for their servants to cover their hands and mouths with oiled clothes and to burn such when returning from errands. All food was to be heated over flame to kill miasmic humors…

As they rounded the corner past the block house of Yegrid the Half-Jew, two scrawny ruffians—no, tradesmen having fallen on lean times—tugged to and fro at the body of a scrawny dog of medium size. They snarled curses at one another as first one pulled on the forelegs of the beast, and then the other yanked on the hind-legs. These two seemed not to notice that they obstructed the progress of their betters and kept at it. Once again Ibis’s saber licked form its scabbard with a whistle-like rasp, and the men were each falling to opposite sides of the street, each the owner of half a skinny dog carcass.

The long slant street between the jeweler’s shops and the clothier’s shops was dank with a terrible stench, but not occupied by any unsavory characters. Only one person, a tradesman’s wife, in full veil, squatted in the street, beside the gutter, he supposed picking up some dropped valuable. He imagined how desperate she must be for whatever she had dropped, as the street cleaners had not been out since at least Aquarius. Animal dung and dog excrement fairy lined the street. A squad of guards held the far end of the street against the lower classes.

He decided on mercy in these terrible times and leaned over his donkey’s neck to give a good day to this woman of a class beneath his. “Good day wife. Mind to soak your veil in rose pedal water, as other remedies are so dear these days.”

The woman flashed a set of dark eyes up at him as she clutched at the corner of her dropped veil with one hand and palmed a handful of donkey dung with the other, from which she ate greedily, and with a crazed relish.

His stomach flipped, threatening to betray its contents as he recoiled. Ibis’s sandaled foot flashed across the paves and the woman’s head cracked loudly against the wall. His voice was now gruff. “I am sorry Master. I knew not what she was up too. The carrion must be running out.”

He wondered dreamily if she would live, and did not have the courage to look behind him to ascertain her condition, wretched with filth as she was.

They transited the third, fourth, and fifth streets of the Slaver’s Quarter without hardly seeing a soul. The guards at the mouth of the street they had just quit implored them to be on the lookout for street-thieves, murderers, and even hyenas.

“Hyenas!”

He wished to speak. But drawing in another full breath might unnerve his stomach and cause him to wretch. Never would he retch before The Fat One, who, by the looks and sound of him, seemed completely unperturbed by the fetid fabric of the world they presently journeyed through.

‘Shall I become this callous if I spend enough time out in this hell of corruption?’

‘Now I know he wished Ibis for a guard. I wonder what has happened to his own bully boys; those two nasty Armenian thugs of his?’

‘Time enough to ask later; indoors, among incense scented chambers!’

Abruptly they came upon the Great Bazaar, beneath the duty house of the Commandant, which could be seen above the sea of tents. They need only traverse this filthy tent city of ruffians and farmers in from the denuded countryside and he would be at his destination, hopefully standing above the corrupt air of the lower quarters on the castellated roof of He Who Kept Order in the Sultan’s Name.

He was amazed at the stoicism of Ibis, having journeyed here regularly for him and Sulyman on various errands. This open quarter of the city, not crowded with buildings, but consisting largely of tents, reeked to heaven. The stench of the cattle pens was nothing compared to what he experienced in this pit of filth and wretched humanity, hovering s it did about the level of worm-kind.

“Hurry Ibis. Get me through this before I retch.”

Ibis handed the reins to Little Ibrahm, drew his saber, and began bellowing, “Make way scum! Make way for a man of means!”

The milling masses of stinky people and their bony cattle, bleating goats, sallow-eyed donkeys, and leering ruffians gave way slowly, until finally a ruffian who attempted to wrestle a goat from a farmer barred the way. His head went flying from his shoulders before the eye could follow Ibis’s blade. The farmer pulled away frantically from the headless blood-gushing fountain of the corpse even as other ruffians dashed in and began drinking at the fountain that was the bloody neck stump, some holding the body up in a quest for its pumping blood, and the tallest among them drinking deep, the others frantically licking the drippings.

The crowd parted around the gushing body and they followed this course, Abd al-Latif reeling in the saddle trying not to vomit as his stomach flipped within him like a parchment sheet upon a torrential breeze—‘Yes, it was better to try and write on that storm-wracked coast than within this pit of Hell!’

Ibis continued to bellow, “Make way! Make way!”

He could feel Little Ibrahm clutching his leg with a shaking hand as the frightened boy tried not to lose contact with Master and beast. Then, somehow, they found themselves separated from Ibis by a tent and a camel, ringed by three ruffians who clutched at Abd al-Latif’s satchel, and also at Ibrahm, as if he were that farmer’s goat! Awn al-Muzan was nowhere to be seen.

‘God help us!’

Just then the hand that clutched at Ibrahm came off in a spray of arcing blood, and the arm that clutched at his master’s satchel dropped to the dirty flagstones. Ibis was singing some song in a heathen tongue and the crowd gave way around the two maimed ruffians. Everywhere was silence as the armless man staggered into the crowd and the other ruffian picked up his own hand from the ground. Then, as one, the crowd fixed on the disembodied arm, and surged after the gruesome object!

In mere moments Ibis had gathered them, and Awl al-Muzan and his company under a tent, where a wine merchant lay sprawled in death across his counting table. He glared at them all, and hissed loudly at the three boys, “Up this incline ahead, through the tents, behind me as I cut our way through the cloth!”

'I must thank Ibrahm for blooding my nose, for the blood crusted therein. Imagine the reek had through an uninjured nose!'