Chapter 9: A Man You Can Count On
-Abd al-Latif, Useful and instructive reflections on things that I have seen and events that I have witnessed in Egypt
June, 1201, Cairo, the Eve of Ramadan
Yusuf bin Yiju could not drive from his mind the image of the whore’s cook-pot. He had been to this whore a hundreds nights before, and she had always been handy with the cook-pot, of which she kept a large one to feed her many clients. The thought of the five children’s heads bobbing like choice savories in a spiced stew that smelled better than any lamb preparation still had his head spinning. He remained so frantic that he scarcely realized when his packhorse gave under its burden and keeled over dead on the dusty track, a track that had seen not a drop of water for a year.
‘Damned, damned I am! Measure up man: how far out; how fit your mount; anything to salvage—only I need salvaging! Blast the goods. There will be nothing to trade in yonder Cairo.’
Yusuf retrieved only the water skins and grain bag for use by he and his trusty pony. He was a practical man who went in not for the sleek Arabian stallion of the horseman, but for the rugged pony. He was three days out from Alexandria. When that louse Abdul Matin had sent word by pigeon for him to come to Cairo he had laughed off the notion as a fool’s errand. But the whore’s cook-pot—and his mad murder of her that had the authorities on his heels—had driven him upon the road to the place that has surely become the hell of hells on earth.
‘Look at this.’
Yusuf, a converted Jew out of Valencia, had ironically—or perhaps by The Hand of God—lost his track, and found himself by the remains of an old synagogue. That structure had been so pillaged for building materials that it was but a heap. But the geniza—the box-like out building with a slot in the top for the deposit of unneeded documents which contained the word of God, or God's inviolate name, and which therefore could not be destroyed in good conscience—still stood.
Beyond the geniza he heard a shovel slide through rocky earth—a looter perhaps that he might deal with. Just in case he mounted his pony and edged him out around the geniza slowly.
‘Good God! I have leaped from the cook-pot into the coals!’
He looked upon twelve spectral figures—robed Arab imams and tall lean bully boys with Turkic features congregated above the small cemetery. Four of the Turks dragged forth a moldering Jewish corpse with grave hooks as one stood by with shovel in hand and the five imams seemed to pray.
‘They must be under some spell not to have heard my packhorse keel over?’
The shovel man looked through him with the eyes of a beast and Yusuf whipped his mount furiously, looking over his shoulder as he thundered down the track to Cairo, a mere few hours away, just now coming into sight, like a corpse seen anew from afar.
The pony soon strained.
“Oh boy, slow. I cannot have you pull up lame.”
He looked over his shoulder for signs of pursuit again and then recalled seeing no horses.
‘They will stay with the horse and strip it. They will be eating out there for days. Ease your way down to the city. Go down to the canals and meander along the banks so that El Frank here can drink his fill. The water in town is likely to be both filthy and dear to the purse.’
Realizing that ruffians might be prowling among the palms and banks of the canals he checked his belt and was comforted by the feel of his ivory-hilted long knife, an arm’s length of sharp steel between him and any fool that sought to bargain for his flesh or coin—or for any whore who thought to feed him vile stew.
As he neared the canal he heard a wonderful piping; the piping of the fakirs of India such as he had heard on the Malabar Coast and down the Black Coast to Zanzibar. The piping was serene and entrancing even from a distance. If there had been a wind he would have simply mistaken the sound for that of the desert spirit coming to tease the soft hearts of civilization on account of their impending doom.
El Frank’s ears twitched curiously, as soothed by the piper’s song as was his master. And so they proceeded down the canal bank that led to the lapping waters of the Nile, lower now than ever in her many thousand year dream of life.
The waters of the canal were mere feet deep, and would be dry halfway through Ramadan, as the Nile was obviously on the wane, and no men worked these banks with buckets, pulley and crane to replenish their muddy depths.
Oh listen to that dreamy song, that breath of life come to kiss my ear. It must be a lady fakir—if one somehow existed—for no man could pipe so sweetly.’
“…He sat upon a lily pedal content to be.
Who did come to bring me his pedals in the night?
What might this bringer be—this man
Who comes so sweet to me?
Come sit on my lily pedal man,
Come sing of night.”
The song in his soul had opened his eyes to the beauty of the world, beauty even in such dry times. He cast smiling eyes on the lady fakir in her ruby slippers, sitting cross-legged and robed in emerald cloth of gold, beneath an umbrella of pink felt.
The knife—no, the beak—ripped through his cheek and splashed his jaw and shoulder with his own blood as the soaring raven wing beat his neck as it shot past like an arrow of night.
‘What?’
The next raven soared like a falcon right at his face and he ducked his chin, just enough so that his eye was saved. A bloody furrow was gouged over his left eye as the deep cawing carrion bird sped past and beat his ear with bloody black wings.
As El Frank reared it seemed as if a rose-colored glass held before his eyes suddenly shattered. The beautiful lady fakir upon her lily pedal was no longer such as she seemed. Rather a naked black man of small proportions, with great obsidian eyes, large feet, and a pointing rat-like chin that widened into a merry big-toothed grin, piping on the thighbone of a big man, sat cross-legged upon the corpse of a crusading Frank, a corpse with more arms than one could count, arms with malformed hands that sprouted strange bobbing organs from their palms like irises from great flower pedals.
“Ride your Christian son of a donkey! Ride!”
And so the stalwart little horse that he had once taken from beneath the ass of some fool monk of Navarre was once more pressed into service to save his lucky hide. He dared not look at the devil in fakir form as he continued to pipe, for the song was sweet, and serene, and wanted of a dancer!
A falcon ‘screed’ and tore his turban and the upper half of his left ear from his head. El Frank pounded down the bank, corpse-strewn water on either side, muddy mad hands crawling up the bank from the murky puddle that had once been a life-giving conduit of bounty. He sought to steady his aching mind, even as he encouraged El Frank with his heels, by looking off to the distance at the devil falcon rising on wing trailing his turban like a demon with a soul in tow.
Then the beat of wings came to his ears and he had company. For as fast as El Frank galloped with him hunched low over his lathering neck, was as fast as the two bloody-beaked crows, one to each side, beat wing off his shoulders, looking not ahead, but hungrily at his eyes.
Yusuf bin Yigu was as superstitious and demon-haunted as the next fellow. But to hell if he was going to be eye-plucked by crows! He grabbed the reigns with conviction and screamed to the only real friend, and only trustworthy crook, he had ever known, “If you leap this canal into the shacks ahead boy, I’ll sneak you into the Sultan’s stables too. For once it will be me on the lookout!”
He had often been laughed at for speaking to this horse in Arabic, after all it was a Christian horse to begin with, so even if it could understand human speech it would not understand Arabic. Yusuf might be a scoundrel, and might have cheated enough men to earn a hundred berths in hell, but he was a believer, and so was his horse. The dumb Christian brute believed in him and his voice when he called, and just now he called for the leap that had gotten him away from many a horseman.
Strangely enough, as the sinking feeling in his belly declared the long leap over the mad mud-clutching hands below, the crows veered off gracefully without a caw, as the song of the pipe behind him shrieked like a vast raven, like a bird that no living man had ever seen—and which he was in no hurry to see himself…
To be concluded in the novellas Fruit of The Deceiver, Book One: The Black Horseman, and Forty Hands of Night, Fruit of The Deceiver, Book Two: The Pale Horseman.
