Chapter 8: The Bookseller
-Sura LXXIX
June, 1201, Cairo
Awn al-Muzan had come from Yemen, sailing up the placid Red Sea, when he was yet a boy, when he was yet fit and could still see his sandaled feet. Having gotten into the book trade quite by accident he prospered, and for the past forty years had operated his prestigious little shop in the very shadow of the mosque of Ahmad ibn Touloun. His trafficking in medical texts had become so lucrative that he had settled down to learn a thing or two about the medical arts from among his own collection, and gradually became regarded as a doctor himself.
‘How Fortune turns, particularly upon the old.’
Not two months ago he had been the Municipal Health Advisor to the Commandant of Cairo—but then the horror of the day among the tents, and the anxiety of his over the experience caused him to resign. And now, here he sat, alone, among his stacks, in a time so wretched and barren of food and trade that no one, not even the fabulously rich, had coin for a book.
‘Oh my, I am ruined. Even dear Abd al-Latif and his man Ibis have forsaken me. Ibis no longer calls on me. My donkey boys too have abandoned me. Whatever happened to little Shams?’
Awn al-Muzan’s junior donkey boy had disappeared mysteriously. Juzjani, his faithful donkey boy and one time lover, had deserted him outright after his donkey—‘his best friend really, he even had a name for it’—was butchered alive by a gang of rascals before his very door.
That was three days gone. It was now the waning days of Gemini, in the shadow of Ramadan—the holy month of day-long fasting which he had ever dreaded. He sat before his reading table, his eyes scorched to dust by the many candles which he would soon miss, as his last candle flickered to a nub before him. He hefted his prodigious belly, which now sagged with loose skin, as if he said good bye to an old and trusted friend.
Before him sat the last of his sustenance, seven sweet dates which he had already pitted and stuffed with the last of his crushed pine nuts. He knew, that meager though this repast was, having many times devoured a dozen such plates in an evening, that it was a grand feast indeed in these terrible times. As ravenous as he was he feared eating the last of his food, for once done, his last hope of earthly comfort would be gone, forever.
‘I wish I had the courage and the young legs to make my way to the Commandant’s duty house. But I am fat, on in years, and am stalked by the prowlers outside even as I sit.’
He looked down at the seven tender morsels, not wanting to abandon all hope by eating them, but knowing, when this long guttering candle finally sizzled lifelessly upon its plate, that rude dirty hands would crash through the door at his back—strong though it was—and that the dates would be shoved into filthy gore encrusted muzzles that had once been the bearded mouths of men, now the snouts of the damned!
“Oh Merciful God, I have fallen short, grown fat, and have not been man enough to bring more faithful into the world in the form of sons and daughters. I implore though, that I have not eaten of man—a slave to hunger though I am—and did share my food with my darling Juzjani and even that reprobate Shams. May my suffering be mercifully swift, as merciful as God the Compassionate!”
The first date tasted sweet—oh so sweet.
The second date he barely tasted, tossing it onto his tongue with such haste as he did.
The third date he chewed poorly in his greed and it sat like a sorry lump in his shrunken stomach, reminding him like a pious imam of his gluttony.
The fourth date had lost some of its appeal as the flame flickered dangerously low to the plate.
The fifth date tasted sour, as the last light of his candle guttered to death before he finished chewing. He was barely able to choke it down.
The sixth date, tasted of salt, of the sea wind, of the grim desert jinn, as the salt from his tears rolled into his mouth and mixed with his last meal.
The seventh date was in his hand when the battering ram crashed through his heavy door, the heavy scurry of giant rat-like feet swarming into his shop marking the arrival of those who came silently in the night to feast upon the loose flesh that yet hung to his old bones.
The date squished in his hand and he felt the grit of the crushed nuts within, the belly of the biggest date that he had filled so caringly with a double portion of the precious stuff.
‘No fool, do not rise, sit with dignity. Do not be wrangled like a beached whale in your own private space!’
There he sat, among his looming stacks, at his mahogany table had at great cost, as the lurid shadows gathered in the light of the moon that shone through the ruined door at his back. His body was wracked with sobs, which he tried to bring under control. This only deepened his humiliation as his chest seized up short of breath as it so often did in the night when it kept him from good sleep. What was worse was the sniffle of his nose, like a big boy crying in the night when he wakes without his mother.
The shapes of men, their scrawny vulture-like outlines, the narrow cast of their heads, stopped moving in the dark. He looked around supposing himself surrounded by a score of ruffians; none of them even half his weight. Their reek was that of the grave, the butcher’s stall, and the chamber pot all in one—spiced with the rank sweat of long-toiling unwashed men.
One of them to his right was severely pneumonic, heaved a heavy lung, and coughed up a great goo-gagger of mucus, hurling it to the floor with a sickening splat.
Behind him a candle flickered and the silhouette of his own fat head was seen shadowed before his eyes upon the gaunt flickering chests of the reeking rascals.
To his left a bully snarled in a dreadful guttural, which seemed to have been half Urdu in inspiration, “Let us roast him where he sits—make a fire of this here high man’s table.”
Behind and to his right a small rascal crept forward sniffing like the Sultan’s scent hounds at his hand. Mindlessly afraid of his end even though he knew it was surely nigh, he sought to buy a few moments by turning his hand over and opening the palm. With that the dirty little fiend scampered up onto the table and began licking the date paste from his palm and from between his fingers with a sickening lapping sound and the disgusting sense of a cat’s rough tongue.
A burly ruffian before him raised a big dagger in the candlelight and snarled, “Eating out of turn!”
The dagger descended like a lightning bolt in the night and pinned the licking fiend’s head to the table top with a squishing ‘kthunk’. The sensation of the dagger piercing his hand and driving it like a shingle against a roof beneath the grotesque and still licking head brought a howl of pain and horror from his blubbery lips. “Merciful God!”
The ‘shing’ of a dozen knives flying from their sheathes and the demon dance that was the butchering of the licking rascal whose head remained pinned to his hand and the table by the great dagger, caused him to heave vomit across the table. Then the dagger withdrew, his neck was looped by a rope, and cold steel hooks, one to each side, pierced the hanging skin above his hips with much scraping pain and dragged him away from the table. He pushed with his feet to aid in his dragging as he did not want the hooks to tear through his flank flab. Then, as he was dragged from his stacks through the shop toward the waiting mob in the street he saw the ruffians in command, who had not actively butchered their fellow, dividing up the more solid chunks of his vomit where he had spewed the last meal of his life across his prize mahogany table, as matter-of-factly as money-changers at market.
The candlelit darkness of his refuge receded to a noisome picture window into hell as the milky silver of the moon bathed him in enough light to see the faces of those who crowded about him in the street for their fair portion of his flesh. Tears welled up afresh in his eyes and the face before him remained out of focus until it’s owner looped a rope around his wrist, while another did likewise, preparing him to be quartered by the knives of their betters. It was then, that he realized that this smallest among the ruffians was none other than his dear donkey boy. “Oh Juzjani! Oh Merciful God no!”
