“…tired and weak old men would exchange the dead bodies of starved children, and gnaw the bones.”

-China, 178 B.C.

Misr is the Arabic name for Egypt. It has proven impossible for me to locate a detailed map of medieval Egypt prior to the Fifth Crusade. This makes Abd al-Latif’s account of a number of events problematical to locate, as he places them in Misr, in such narrative context that Misr is understood to be a city, not too distant, but of secondary importance to Cairo. The events he describes along with the happenings in Misr all happen along the branch of the Tannic Nile, in the countryside, which would be to the east of the Nile as Cairo was on the east bank, and on the road up into Syria. This places all of his accounts, other than the Alexandrian cauldron of baby heads, to the east-northeast of Cairo. According to his account every last person of Misr died. I am writing on the assumption that his reference referring to Misr indicated an outlying community on the road to Syria along the Tannic Nile that was not repopulated after the famine.

Abd al-Latif woke in a hot sweat—not the cold sweat of fear, but the hot sweat of a worried sleep. All forty vulture claws that had been dragging him down into the abyss could be heard skittering down the wall to the roof where…

‘…I must wake. Rise fool, from your hell!’

He sat arrow straight on his sleeping mat next to poor Shamballah Ali who forever cradled the gaping socket where his eye had been until just last night on the eve of Ramadan. The destitute slaver was a pitiful sight.

‘It is near the time for sunset prayer. The Commandant should be stabled and reclining downstairs. Up with you laggard physician and coward; somehow respected by all even after the loss of your prize patient and injury to your charitable patient. The Commandant will not think so highly of me after he finds out about Ali and the Baby.’

Abd al-Latif made his way to the stairs and down through the Commandant’s apartment that had been so generously set aside for the use of he, his servants, and his patients. He found no one but Beadra and the distraught mother of the Baby, who he had sedated with opium, and was being fanned on the Commandant’s couch.

‘Out to the court, horsemen will be there to inform me.’

Uncle Ibis stood like an ebon statue at the portal to the court, his silk pants and vest of red off-setting his black scarified skin. The old boy was beyond fifty years, once a slave to the Sultan—a renowned headsman—and before that some savage warrior who attended a Christian prince of Ethiopia, who had made a gift of his three best men to the Sultan as a gesture of goodwill. Ibis never betrayed his feelings. But his sword seemed to hang with a certain melancholy from his hip. Ibis had been venturing out into the streets of late by the light of the moon to butcher the rascals who would eat their fellow men, who had verily stripped the city bare of its poor children and weak elderly.

“Master," his voice intoned, like a deadened Christian bell, "I should not have sent the boy after the Commandant. If he had caught up with the column they should be back by now.”

‘Oh, he is warming up to the little prankster.’

“It was my decision Ibis. He will be fine, what with the horsemen out on the road, who would dare lay a hand on our donkey boy, bearing a message to the Commandant."

Ibis looked at him gravely, “I advised it so. You were distraught.”

As the deep voice drew off the clatter of hooves hit the flagstones and his heart warmed up, hoping to soon be bathed in the confident radiance of the Commandant. Abd al-Latif was only a confident man in the matter of medicine. These other terrible matters he had been plunged into as the Commandant’s medical advisor on the famine, the attendant plagues, and what was being called ‘the flesh-eating mania’ quashed his resolve. He needed a leader, that bold warrior who carried such a nimbus of confidence about him that exhausted horseman would of a sudden perk up with energy at the mere sound of his voice.

Three such exhausted horsemen now tumbled from their lathered and dusty mounts as the stable boys—the only boys in Cairo currently safe from the flesh-eaters—raced to take charge of the mounts. The lead horseman was Babyrs, a dashing Turkish war slave who had just been donated to the Commandant’s guard by the Sultan himself. Babyrs and Ibis knew each other well. Babyrs swaggered up to Ibis, who towered above him, “So Blackbone, what is eating at you. I haven’t seen that look on your face since you beheaded that Venetian spy and the bloody clot splashed across the Sultan’s new silk pantaloons. Hah, Al-Adin, son of Great Saladin, spattered by his over-eager headsman at the very first execution he ordered!”

Ibis’s pride was tickled by the young Turk’s manner, and so he bristled a bit as he got to the point. “I advised my Master to send for the Commandant up the Misr Road. It was urgent. Our donkey boy Ibrahm, the smart little Jew—I sent him.”

Babyrs grinned wickedly. “The cunning little brat who rides the retarded donkey?”

Ibis nodded with a grimace.

Babyrs shook his head as he walked off, “You better find a new Jew-boy for your master. We barely made it back that way—had to cut our way through a pack of rascals you wouldn’t believe. The accursed dervishes have thrown in with the flesh-eaters.”

The brash Turk then stopped and turned, “The Commandant is pursuing a battalion strength band of the fiends into the marsh. He shall not be back until tomorrow. Sorry about the boy—we drew such laughs from the donkey and he stumbling about. He will be missed.”

‘Oh Merciful God, please no, not Ibrahm. He is on his second reading of the Holy Koran and was to be brought to Your True Faith this very Ramadan. Might there be a spare angel in heaven on this wicked day?’

Ibis had walked off to the stable, where he had been in the habit of keeping his things. Abd al-Latif followed him. On the way in he was approached by Niko, the Greek donkey boy, “Master, is it true? Is Ibrahm eaten already?”

‘What do I say to comfort the stupid in such wicked times. I am at my wit’s end. If only I could consult the Baby of the Lilies—no fool. That is a superstition. God does not traffic in such things.’

“Master, Master, here, sit against the wall.”

He was looking up now into the big eyes of the little Christian slave boy who handled the donkeys for the Commandant’s supply steward. The boy was squirting water from a skin into his mouth and two red silk pillars bracketed the boy’s kneeling form like an archway. He looked up to see Ibis standing with his headsman’s cloak and red coif cap, a double water skin hanging across his shoulders.

‘I feel as if my voice has been taken. Must I always grow so weak and faint at such times?’

Ibis peered into him with ebon eyes that seemed to predict death for many a flesh-eater along the track to Misr that was now being called the Harvester’s Sickle Road. His voice rolled like a drum, “He is dear to you Master, so he is dear to me.”

With those words he was off with a rustling of his blood-stained cloak, which, according to some heathen superstition perpetuated by the Sultan’s executioners, must never be washed, and stunk of death, stunk of this long terrible year.

Niko was watering him some more and patting his shoulders, “The old baboon will get Ibrahm back Master. He knows how hard Ibrahm is to kill, for he has tried it himself. Here Master, you ought to know how important water is. What kind of doctor are you?”

‘Indeed, what kind of doctor am I? What kind of man am I before God?’