Chapter 2: After Dusk
“According to Egyptian Christians, Adam and Eve—being expelled from Paradise, where they had lived on the choicest foods—were unable to eat the coarse food they found elsewhere. They suffered greatly from hunger and want, and were soon near to starvation. At this point, Jesus, who was Adam’s sponsor, went to God the Father and asked him if he wished Adam to die. In reply, Yahweh told Jesus that he better give Adam some of his own flesh to eat.”
-Reay Tannahill, Flesh and Blood
The Wanderer’s Way
Yusuf bin Yiju, was aghast at the state of things in Cairo. Nowhere, between Granada and Bagdad was so grand a city, so renowned for the finer things, things that Yusuf, a man of refined tastes and acquisitive nature, much desired. Over the years he had made his way from Granada, through Algiers and Tunis and other places of business always with his eye on ending up in Bagdad. He had been a desert scout and a speculator on long range voyages, even visiting the Dog Isles in the Western Ocean, and journeying far down the black coast to Zanzibar, the two occasions, where he had an opportunity—once before setting out and once after returning with the Red Sea wind at his back—to sample the pleasures of Cairo. But now, he was horror stricken, having barely made it into the city alive ahead of the pet birds of some deranged fakir mesmerist.
‘It was never Granada, but to think things have come to this. Why it is worse than that Alexandrian pest hole I just left. How am I to find a descent companion for the night before I hunt up that louse Abdul? Surely Master Efran’s flesh-house is a pit of pestilence, what with famine and plague apparent.’
El Frank, his infamous criminal pony, nickered as they swung wide around the last destitute and deserted shacks of the poor and spied the first signs of habitation. The barges had not been in operation and El Frank was still agitated about having to swim the Nile with his master on his back. The mud from the flats below the reduced waterline was no longer cooling the pony, but beginning to cake and itch.
Yusuf whispered in the falling light as the distant voice of the adhan called out over the bleak skyline of the reeking city, summoning the faithful to prayer, “It’s not all that bad boy. No crocodile bit off your balls and I will make good on my promise to get you into the stable of the finest mare I can manage.”
The irritated pony, who had just suffered the indignity of fleeing from birds in the deserted farmers’ slums on the far side of the Nile, snorted derisively—or so it would seem to a thief who believed with all of his superstitious heart that his pony was possessed of the spirit of his fellow thief. His acquisitive cohort Musil had the misfortune of dying in the scuffle that brought the pony into Yusuf’s possession. Specifically, the cranky Christian pilgrim—monk, whatever—who he and Musil had robbed on the road to Valencia, had brained Musil with his stave, and the poor boy had lingered into the night slung over the back of this pony, who became obstinate the very next day, as soon as he had buried Musil by the roadside. Thus had been born the superstition held by Yusuf that El Frank, his larcenous mount, had become possessed by the spirit of his randy friend.
He patted his old friend on the neck and hissed, “Look the promise to get you into the Sultan’s stables—well that was a bit optimistic, don’t you think? It was do or die and I needed you to do, not die. You must admit, since becoming an equine you are not as sharp with the immediate plan as you once were. I will live up to my promise. As soon as you sniff out a well bred mare in season, I’ll get you into her stable. And, if you turn out to be too short to get the job done, well, that’s none of my fault.”
A stone ‘thunked’ into his thigh and another bounced off his shoulder, while two more rocky missiles pattered off of El Frank’s hide. A quick look to the right saw a band of rascals fleeing back toward the Nile through a parallel row of huts. El Frank wanted to bolt after them, but Yusuf held him in reign, knowing it to be a ruse to lead him into an ambush. He brushed his boy’s side with his left hand as he nudged him onward with his heels and drew his long knife in case things got rough up ahead.
He hissed in El Frank’s ear, “A little trot boy. That is the rag quarter ahead. Those piss-gowns will not have had anything but crocodile shit to eat for the past month. We don’t want to end up in some whore’s cook pot now do we—get on!”
He thrilled to the feel of the tension in El Frank’s neck and to the anticipation of some savage knife work ahead. Between the stench cloaked tenements they plunged just as true night fell over a Cairo that he might have found more recognizable had it just been taken by a dirty crusader horde. He placed the reigns in his teeth and drew his sapper club from the wide leather belt that bound his sturdy robes about his waist. His head felt fragile and exposed without his turban, lost in the wicked chase on that bank of the Nile that he swore he would never tread again. He was expecting a rock to the skull at any moment and edged El Frank on accordingly.
His trousers were still soaked from the swim across as were the lower portion of his robes, which he now felt clinging to his partner’s flanks and began to fear could be more easily grasped and used to drag him to his doom. The night was taking on the darker tone of fear known as dread, troubling his superstitious soul. Yusuf had committed enough wrongs in this life that he did not expect God—even though he remembered him five times daily, travelling or not, which was not a requirement—to ever intercede on his behalf.
‘Stop it man. You are The Most Wanted Thief of Valencia, Survivor of the Dog Isles Fiasco, the Foil of the Tuaregs—you are hated for good reason, for you are hard to kill. Bone up—but keep your head down—and ride!’
His inner tension and barely contained panic infected his equine partner and the boy’s hooves fairly thundered down the hard-packed track toward the distant minarets of the Good City, where the Good People surely still lived, enjoying what was left of what was good in life. They galloped through the open space that had once served as a boy-seller’s auction and here heard the sound of brittle bones breaking beneath the hooves of El Frank.
Even as the chill thus brought up from his bowels traveled the length of his spine he spied a pack of dark figures, perhaps twenty naked men smeared with charcoal and holding firebrands which embers burned low and red, as if snatched from a long smoldering fire. At the sight of he and his fit mount their eyes bugged wide and their teeth shined against the embers. The most chilling thing about these rascals as they picked up their pace and bore down on them, was that they gave no cry, issued no threat, but rather snarled as would hungry dogs on the scent of juicy prey.
He made no more pretense at a whisper to his increasingly fearful mount, whose eyes bugged out to the side taking in the band of rascals that pursued he and his master with an unsettling intensity, “Run or roast boy—run or roast!”
El Frank leaped a fallen form, that might or might not have been human, and then dug into the hard-packed earth of the rising street with a fury that made Yusuf proud to be the owner of a Christian pony possessed by the soul of a Muslim thief.
The Slave Girl