“People ate human flesh; and more than half the population died.”

He reclined upon the hay as if he, himself, were an animal. He chewed on his lip nervously as if he were a beast chewing its cud. The truth was he wanted to descend into an insensate state so that his medical responsibilities might fall from him like a veil falls before a rightful husband. He experienced these sentiments dully as one senses the breeze brush the skin with no effort of contemplation, for he had not the energy to castigate himself in his mind or muse after the irony of such barbarities as he had witnessed committed by the faithful beneath a Merciful God.

The time for remembering God at sunrise had passed before the news of Ibrahm had come; while Abd al-Latif, the little donkey boy’s negligent master, had been gripped by the terrible forty talons of the vultures who had sought to drag him to hell in his madly unholy dream about the Baby of the Lilies, another child he had failed. It was no wonder that God had not blessed him with a wife who could have borne him children, for she had died of an unknown malady in his very arms scarcely a month into their marriage. He traveled and sought medical knowledge chiefly to erase this shame. He barely had the energy to wake himself long enough to recall these failures and then fall back into sleep, his bare head weighting the light hay.

The call of the adhan to summon the faithful to noon prayer awakened him briefly. He noted that Niko kept close by, nervously pacing, as if he feared a reprimand from the steward for letting the renowned ‘doctor’ slumber in the hay. Once again, having failed to answer the call to remember God and his good graces, Abd al-Latif nodded back off to sleep even as the sun climbed to its zenith and reminded all of what oppressive heat awaited them, unwatered and unloved, should they walk the left hand path to hell…

“Master, Master!” came the chirping voice of Niko. “You must wake. The captain of the day patrol asks for you.”

“The hay felt too plush to abandon. He did open his eyes to regard the pest and the boy went into a fit. “Master, Babyrs and the captain say you must decide in the absence of the Commandant, that this is a matter of medicine.”

The little pest was dragging him to his feet and out the stable door into the harsh light of the merciless day. By the time he was ushered through the compound gate to the judgment court, where the fate of the lowly was decided, he had himself in fair appearance, his gown free of hay and unruffled. The outer court was even more harshly lit though he stood in the shade of the wall. Across the way was the horsemen’s barracks. The court was simply the wide stretch of road where the paved way passed between the barracks and the garrison commander’s compound; the place where horsemen were reviewed in their ranks, and were the poor were brought to task in their misery. To the right, where the road narrowed on the way to Misr—the road down which both of his loyal slaves had disappeared—thick posts made of finished palm trunks had been recently erected. When he saw these his heart sank into his belly.

‘Oh God, it begins, begins on my watch!’

For the past few months the Commandant had been having flesh-eaters burned at such posts in the proximity of their crimes, so that it would be made known to the locals how gruesome the punishment was. The Imam had insisted on burning as a means of educating the faithful who watched—and did so burn—on the eternal fate of sinners, who were to be damned and burned in hellfire for eternity. The Commandant favored burning as it was a terrible death and might deter flesh-eating. Abd al-Latif, as the Chief Medical Adviser to the Commandant, had concurred on the grounds that the flames might extinguish whatever evil humors had caused this mania for flesh-eating, as it was clearly not normal—at least not on this scale—even in times of famine. Now, since the horsemen were having difficulty conducting summary executions among the masses of flesh-eaters, the practice was to be conducted on their doorstep. The Commandant had warned him that it would come to this.

Before him stood two horsemen with two wretched poor between them; a young couple, married—her in her veil—and apparently of the artisan class, and hence not altogether wretched, but of some means, until the famine that is. On the paved court at their feet was a basket which he regarded with dread.

Abd al-Latif stood next to the Imam, who stood stern and granite-faced in his long white gown and finely knitted kufi—with his great pointed beard sweeping down judgmentally, his eyes dark and beady with ire.

To his left side stood Babyrs, the Turk, acting commander in the Commandant’s absence, who spoke gruffly, “Doctor, we know where the Imam stands, but he is not to be soiled by judgment in such things. I have been left in command of patrols and compound security. The Commandant wished for you to make judgments in such cases as we have here, as this is all summary. We will not be dragging these sorts before the Sultan or his judges. They have their hands full punishing the rich.”

‘Fleecing the rich with fines more like, and then releasing them to dine on more of mankind!’

‘Hold yourself together man.’

Looking for a speaker other than himself he looked to the left, between Babyrs and one of the horsemen and found the captain of the day patrol there, standing firm and haughty. He nodded to the captain, who stepped forward and spoke, “We found these two hustling away from one of the communal dung fires with this charred basket and thought it suspicious.’

‘Oh yes, it is charred—must have been what bothered me about it. I think I shall be faint.’

The firmness of his own voice surprised him, “And what is in the basket captain?”

The captain strode forward, bent, knocked the lid of the wicker basket aside curtly, lifted the basket, and brought the thing over to Abd al-Latif, who looked down into it as if he looked into the very pit of hell. Within was an infant that was entirely black, the skin having crisped away as it was roasted. He would not reach his hand in to examine, but could tell that the neck had been broken. He found himself—looking at the baby as a patient of sorts—able to control his simultaneous urges to retch and faint.

“Captain see to it that the baby is properly interred by giving him over to the clergy. He then looked at the woman. “Where did you get this baby?”

She did weep as she spoke, “I gave birth to him under Aires, just as this scourge deprived my husband of means. My milk dried up and he was to die of starvation.”

The husband interrupted, “It is our baby, my son. We can do with him what we want. I snapped his little neck so that he would not suffer. If we had buried him in the poor yard the rascals would have dug him up like they have the rest!”

He heard a creaking sound to his left and then, as he turned and saw the great Turkish bow bent back like an elongated C, heard the twang of the chord and the song of the arrow, which pierced the pelvis of the man and exited his rear end with a horrid popping sound, the feathers still visible where they pinned the man’s short dirty gown to his pelvis in a widening stain of blood. The woman whimpered and the man groaned and pitched forward, alive and in severe agony.

Babyrs growled, “Speak when spoken to, but feel free to howl for mercy.”

The woman was fairly melting in her own dirty tears as Babyrs and the captain glared at Abd al-Latif, demanding with their eyes that he reaffirm the Commandant’s standing order.

‘In their heart they detest their duty—hence this charade of my making the decision. As torn as I am inside how can I seem so serene?’

‘The Baby of the Lil—no!’

‘Burn, you of sin, burn.’

Again the sure tone of his voice surprised him, though he stood in a trance as if walking in a dream when he heard the words, “In the name of the Sultan, by the authority of the Commandant, the eaters of the flesh of men are to be burned. And you, man and woman, have prepared to eat your baby, for which crime you shall burn at the stake.”

The Imam completed his statement so that it might have religious sanction, “And so shall you burn forever in the fires of the dammed, as Lahab burned, and his wife with him.”

The two dirty people who were once of a tolerable class, were then dragged to the stakes. He would not cower away, but would not go up to experience the agonies he had confirmed any more closely. The Imam did the same, apparently not as stern as he sounded. In the meantime Niko and another boy brought hay while the steward and his man-slave hauled out a cart of firewood. In what seemed like a frighteningly short length of time the horsemen, stewards and boys had arranged two pyres about the feet of the stake-bound parents, the man in utmost pain, but the woman in a worse agony of the heart.

With a ‘whoosh’ of flame the hay took light, and then the dried kindling and split wood, and with that the greasy clothes of the two would be flesh-eaters. The crackling of the skin came next and their howls of anguish split the sky. He saw the man crashing his own head against the post trying to knock his brains out as he howled. And the poor woman, still weeping as she screamed piteously, whipped her burning hair around in a frenzy; a living torch of shameful agony. Then the breeze shifted to a westerly one, as if God had heard the woman cry and wanted Abd al-Latif to taste her steaming tears. The stench of their miserable end caught in his nostrils and made the imam gag as well, who, suddenly not as pious as he had been, looked to Abd al-Latif, who had a readymade excuse already formed on his lips, “The vile humors, Imam, could be carried on the wind. We should retire.”

The sight of Niko dancing a jaunty step around the burning stakes alongside the other donkey boy as Babyrs and the crueler of the two guardsmen clapped their hands in tune infected him with the notion that perhaps those forty hands of night had dragged him to hell after all, and there awaited only his turn at the burning stakes that just now showed the way for the those who would eat the flesh of their fellow men—and ‘those’ were many, and hungry unto madness.