“Throughout Egypt all the dust turned into maggots.”

He choked on dust even as he skinned his knee and popped a toe scrambling along the road with two snarling ruffians sprinting after him. Their snarls gave impetus to his dash for life, but the fact that only two pursued…

‘Are these the special fast ruffians who cannot be outpaced?’

‘Perhaps they regard your run so far as so feeble as to be a sure sign that you shall be easily caught?’

‘Oh Old Moses, we may be together again in the bellies of these fiends!’

Little Ibrahm ran more swiftly than he ever had. He was aided by being well fed while his pursuers were obviously not. He was also lightly dressed in jacket, cap and pants while they labored under heavy robes and turbans. His slippers would have been an impediment if he had not run clean out of them!

‘Run!’

His cap flew from his head as the dust kicked up behind his heels.

‘I am swift I am, the swiftest hare on this damned road!’

On he ran up the road. The hard scuffing of the calloused feet of the rascals and their ragged breaths came to him as sound like the whispers of devils in a dream.

‘I am swift enough! I shall do it. I shall outpace these nasty eaters of children!’

The ground came up to meet his face with such speed that his chin fairly bounced off of it. The taste of dust choked his cry. He instinctively rolled right down into the thicket. As he slid face first down among the camel weeds and the other desiccated brush—none with a leaf or bud upon it—the hard nails and grasping fingers of a strong hand grabbed his leg below the knee, but the hand was wet and Ibrahm wiggled away down under the riot of the skeletal roadside weeds.

His jacket tore away, left hanging from the dead plants that rustled when he crawled through them. These same dead plants snapped and popped behind him as a man crashed through at a fast walk in pursuit of the furiously crawling boy.

‘A few paces to go and dusty daylight is mine, a wide world to flee across—rise and run, bowl through!’

Ibrahm shredded his boney shoulders and bare chest on the last branches of the thicket and he was off across the once irrigated cropland toward a symbol of hope, a large ancient tree, with barren arms spread welcomingly. He had not been able to outrun Ibis—long-legged baboon that he was—and had been caught and ear pinched after most of his numerous pranks on the Ethiopian, There had been minor victories. Just three nights past, when Ibis had caught him spying as he molested the Horseman’s wife’s wet nurse’s sister, the old boy had stopped mid-poke to chase him down. But Ibrahm had dodged this way and that beneath those long ebon arms and had climbed the very wall of the stables!

‘If I am runner enough to make the tree, than I am the climber that will not be caught. Ibis himself talked of the leopard sitting atop a tree and out-waiting the lions below.’

He glanced over his shoulder as he ran across the once lush topsoil turned to dust. Behind him the more stalwart ruffian was just breaking clear of the shrubs as the other one trailed. They were not alone, lumbering rag-swaddled skeletons that had once been women hurried in his wake from left and right as fast as they might. These he could outpace easily, though their presence sent a chill through his soul.

He picked up speed, seemed free as the last thread of clothing—impractical felt pants acquired by Beadra with an eye toward making him look all the more the scholarly part—fell away to the dusty earth. The sound of his heart pounding, of his feet striking the dusty earth, drowned out the sounds of pursuit. Wondering if he was still being followed he looked over his shoulder to see two swift men and three slow women in his wake. Then one woman reached down and picked up his torn felt undergarment and stopped, sniffing the article, and then began to lick it!

“No you don’t you nasties!”

And faster he ran, outstripping the men by a good margin, running as he now did in his nakedness as the great tree loomed ever more near. As the tree came more clearly into focus he could see that its wide spreading branches were hung with fruit, and that this fruit dropped into piles beneath the tree.

‘Is this a mirage to beckon me to hell? Am I on the footpath to hell?’

‘I so wish I knew—but never mind, run, run past the tree, run for ever, run until those that follow die of thirst!’

The great tree loomed nearer, spanned wider, and slowly came into focus as something more like a gallows, more like the horror within the butcher’s tent. The tree, great though it was, offered no shade, its leaves seemed to have died. As he pounded ever closer he noticed that there were no piles of fruit beneath the tree. Rather, these were seated ruffians and hags, long river poles in hand, tending to the hanging fruit, lazily nudging the harvest this way and that in the breeze, to make certain that the sun cured the fruit evenly and that the flies that swarmed among the hanging fruit were ever disturbed. The fruit that so hung from the branches of the great tree was not fruit at all, but dozens of skinned infants drying in the sun as some grisly snack. There they hung, dried and desiccated, like so many great locusts stuck to their cocoon tree.

‘I must tell the Commandant about this. The road is but the first of it.’

The sight struck him as a blow and he stopped. With plenty of lead he considered the people sitting on the ground as scant threat, even as they rose threateningly, for their long-bent knees would not carry them swiftly. Then, as he considered his course, a fire lit up in the back of his mind as a stone bounced loudly from his little head. He clearly heard the painful stone strike his head and then the ground. He did not hear the little donkey boy’s body hit the ground, though it surely did.