The caked mud flew from El Frank’s flanks. Despite being wet Yusuf’s robes billowed out behind. The horde of charcoal colored fiends gained no ground but did keep pressing; kept coming, as if hoping some fickle goddess of chance would knock him from the saddle.

With instincts honed in lonely barren places he felt the urge to duck his head and he did just that. As his face came to El Frank’s straining neck something ‘whooshed’ from a gaping alleyway and brushed his shoulder blades as more rascals darted out from the alley mouths around and began clutching at his ankles and robes, which thankfully slipped through their dirty hands. He planted his heels again into the tired pony’s flanks as he clattered onto the paved way that heralded their ascent to a well-to-do quarter, one that he had once skirted on his way to Efran’s thinking it far above his means.

They scraped hooves a little as they skidded around a deserted stall. Then someone was on his back and El Frank began to buckle. Up ahead was a torch-lit barricade—a refuge and he was to be stopped here, the dirty murderers running up behind him! The dirty hands tore at his throat so he let go the reigns leaving El Frank to judge for himself. Yusuf threw his sapper club into the face of a ruffian that was reaching for him, sending the man toothless to the pavement. He then—just as both hands tightened around his neck from behind and El Frank continued at a trot—reversed grip on his long knife and thrust back past his side. He savored the sound of that wicked blade of wavy-patterned steel slithering through the bowels of the emaciated passenger. Yet the creature still wrung his neck, so he used his shoulder and the traction of the blade against the rascal’s spine where it had passed out his back, to heave him to the side. This almost brought El Frank down, who crashed sidelong into a seller’s stall, but righted himself and made for the barricade up ahead that was coming alive with shouts and wide eyes.

El Frank broke into a gallop and knocked aside a pack of scrambling rascals, one grunting heavily with a bony crunch as he went down beneath the pony’s hooves. El Frank galloped full out toward a breastwork of crates and furniture, behind which stood a number of guards, mostly laborers armed with staffs, though a brawny Turk with a flail officered them. They parted to each side of the narrow street that wound its way between well made stone buildings with the doors bricked up, and even gave a shout as El Frank leaped the barricade and kept on his way. He heard more shouts behind him.

One fellow exclaimed, “Look they feast on their own.”

Another said excitedly, ‘I didn’t think the feasting quarter would cough up another faithful citizen.”

The rascals, now far behind him, could be heard tearing at their fallen fellow. He reigned in El Frank long enough to clean and sheathe his knife and mourn the loss of his club. The Turkish officer bawled, “A good ride that was wanderer.”

He saluted the Turk with a nod, who saluted him back with a bow. It was then time to turn his back on the macabre scene just beyond the torch light where shadows that were blacker than the night danced their grisly dance, tearing their disemboweled fellow to pieces as he attempted to keep his intestines in his belly with his black hands, even as his former feast mates reeled them from his belly like fishing nets drawn up from hell.

‘That was very nearly me.’

“Let us get away from these terrible sights and sounds boy. We are the envy of those who hold out against this mania to eat each other. One day horse traders will speak your name with admiration as they haggle over lesser beasts, setting you as the example.”

El Frank just snorted and pushed on, even more eager than his master to make his way further into this secure enclave, with every third house lit by a lamp hanging above the door—each one tended by a faithful boy—and the serene sound of the faithful remembering God from their rooftop prayer mats. The clatter of El Frank’s hooves made him proud.

He passed by the increasingly well-appointed houses, and then, as the faithful completed their prayers, the occasional good men stepping out through their doorways. These men nodded with respect or simply stared at him in awe. Finally, he passed a velvety looking fellow who spoke with a Persian accent, “How is it crossing the Nile wanderer?”

“He snickered and flashed his teeth as he was want to do—just like his pony—when caught unawares by conversation, “Man-eating fiends on either bank Good Man, and it is no better in Alexandria. Were it not for this pony I’d be food as we speak.”

They kept on walking, El Frank now a little stiff-legged on the level, as the incline had leveled off in an imperceptive manner. Feeling suddenly welcome he shot a compliment over his shoulder. “Thank the Good Men of this quarter for securing the way for a traveler.”

The soft little man, neatly attired in his evening gown and cap, bowed slightly and smiled without comment.

Along the winding lane, between lamp-lit houses, they continued their way, man and pony. He all of a sudden felt the need to walk, to feel this real world under his feet, just as much as he had been content to fly over the nightmare world behind hind him on the back of his scrappy steed. Of course, being who and what he was, he operated under the premise that one always cloaks a self-serving action in the guise of goodwill to others. As he dismounted with a flourish and stepped around in front to check the bit and take the reigns, he said, with a note of sarcasm he would not hide out of respect for his partner, “There you go boy. Take a load off. I will now forge the way through the daunting shadows of night.”

The beast snorted so hard that Yusuf was lathered with a fine mist of mucus. He wiped himself, and led off, as the beast sneezed again, moistening the back of his balding head. “So that’s how it is? I guide you through—oh my, look at her! Please boy, behave so that I might arrange for a night to remember.”

El Frank looked left at the beggar woman leaning dejectedly against the wall and Yusuf snarled under his breath, “No fool, not her; the fine piece of silk-draped pleasure playing with the well-to-do baby before her master’s doorway.”

Yusuf had eyes only for the fine young slave girl who wore her veil a might low, nearly to her chin, revealing a full set of ruby lips. She played with a baby for whom she had contrived a kind of padded pen from a set of pillows, amid which he seemed the very picture of the First Man in Paradise. The girl tickled his belly and giggled, as he ‘cooed’. The girl let him practice squeezing her dainty little fingers with his tiny hands. When she did this Yusuf could not help but notice, beneath her fine servant’s attire, the bud of a supple young breast and the curve of lithe limbs—and even a slight bulge of hip.

‘Imagine: she is yet shapely in this starving time. Suppose I purchase her—imagine how she will bloom when we get to Bagdad! Look at those sparkling eyes of opal—I shall go blind behind curtained doors when that veil comes off!’

The baby was now contentedly cooing, looking up in amazement at the towering form [on his tiny scale, of course] of Yusuf and the massive shadow of El Cid as the girl demurely smiled. “Good Man, shall I call for my master? This is the house of Omar bin Razzi.”

‘I should buy her right here, before her master’s door.’

‘But that will take all of my gold, or most.’

‘Abdul promised work—official business. I will make good.’

She was sitting back now next to the infant in his cushioned cozy, placing her hand protectively on the top of the tiny head, and scooting on the doubtlessly divine cushions of her own, back against the base of the marble-faced wall. She took her hand from the baby’s head to lift her veil to just beneath her eyes in feigned modesty—for her wonderful eyes told all. This was Yusuf’s salient weakness—women, young tender ones especially, not yet beaten down by the cruel years.

He barely managed to draw himself from his trance as El Frank snorted a warning, a warning not to spend his stabling fees on this slave girl, a slave girl for whom Yusuf lacked a house.

“Girl, I am Yusuf bin Yiju, and I—”

*A swift scraping of linen-covered knees and ragged slippers to his left cut him off as El Frank stepped off with a clatter, the baby let out a piteous cough, and the slave girl screamed to all the angels in heaven. Yusuf looked down to his right to see that the beggar woman, her black fingernails sharp in the lamp light, had scurried beneath El Frank and thrust her sharp dirty nails into the soft belly of the baby. The baby was disemboweled, eyes wide at the sight of its own untimely death, as the fiendish woman cradled it in one dirty hand, and tore a handful of intestines from the child and shoved them into her disgusting jagged-toothed mouth with the other filthy hand.

The girl screamed the louder, shaking her hands and hitting high notes he did not know existed. The beggar woman was slinking back and away, eyeing Yusuf with something between fear and warning, all the while feasting on the not yet dead baby’s belly.

A red rage—at himself for being off his guard, and at the world for being such that one must always be on guard, and for turning ever more wretched before his eyes—animated him to a lunging leap the likes he had not made since his youth. Yusuf, frantic to spare the baby any more pain or indignity as it perished, sprang off his rear foot as his arm-long knife whipped from its scabbard in a back hand slash. The wicked woman’s head was falling from the severed stump of a neck before his lead foot hit the ground. And before the baby could drop to the pavement he had it cradled in his left arm.

He stood at the door of the house of well-to-do private citizens, now busy with running shouting people summoned by the continued screams of the slave girl who sat huddled in a terror behind him even as she screamed her throat to sand. The baby was yet conscious, its little sputtering lungs still wheezing, though it bled away at such a rate that it had but an instant left. In that instant Yusuf looked down into its eyes and whispered the best apology he could muster, “Would that I was as smart as my horse you would someday own such a house yourself.”

The baby’s eyes froze in a glassy stare at that instant and Yusuf bin Yiju knew himself to have been cursed by that devil of a fakir back on the banks of the dying Nile.

He sheathed his blade, did his best to place the baby’s parts back into its torn little belly, and turned to hand it to the wailing mother who looked up into his eyes with a ghastly pain.

He had to speak.

“Mother, I will avenge your baby son.”

The frantic woman screamed, “Then you claim the power to smite the Devil!”

“I do Mother, I do.”

‘You are a damned fool, and damned you will be from this moment on.’

Despite the fact that she was probably no longer required on the household staff, and might have been had at a reduced price, the luster of the slave girl’s eyes had worn away. All that remained was his burning hatred for that mesmerist fakir that piped along the far canals, whose pet birds had stripped him of his indigo turban, and who he placed in his mind as the one who had fanned this flesh-eating craze like a game beater fans the flames of a brushfire.

“I will avenge you Mother, or die in the act.”

He leaped into the saddle—not because he thought it was the dashing thing to do—but because he felt guilt for the death of this baby, who might have lived if he had had eyes for anything other than his babysitter, who still shrieked the shriek of the mind that has been lost.

With her shrieks and the piteous wailing of the household women as impetus, he nudged El Frank into a cantor and made toward the Public Quarter, where Abdul the Louse Charlatan Doctor, who had onetime botched the extraction of a Tuareg arrow from his ass and almost killed him, would surely be well-enough connected to provide him with an undershirt of mail. If he was going hunting the Devil he wanted at the least to be prepared.

‘Before God, Mother, I will avenge your baby or die at the Devil’s hand.’

‘Imagine, me a devil-hunting jihadist? If it has come to this it is sure proof that the world has gone to shit.’

*According to the account of Abd al-Latif, who cited such attacks as among the most common suffered by his female patients and their children.