“a great dearth did ensue, whereby many were forced to eat horses, dogs, cats, rats and the loathsome and vile vermin; yea, some abstained not from the flesh of men.”

He sailed down the Tannic Nile on a great lily petal, gliding along to the music of pipes—‘no, it is the reeds, the desert wind plays through the reeds welcoming me to its end. The world will soon bloom in plenty.’

A canebrake loomed ahead and just as he thought he would be marooned there, the song of the reeds picked up its tempo and the wind piloted his lily petal around the islet as if a giant hand pushed at his back ever so gently.

‘Oh Mother, you said it would be so, when I finally died, that I would go to Paradise as if floating.’

The wind suddenly died but the song of the reeds somehow increased to a dirge—a maddening piping that sounded not unlike the ‘whoosh’ of the flames as a baby-eating wife is engulfed and carried off to hell in her agony. Then the river current became a sucking torrent and his lily petal was drawn like a leaf on the wind around the islet, the back of which was not a reed-grown sandbar, but a row of stakes upon which the husband and wife of the Basket Baby smoldered into eternity.

The embers of their eyes were so deeply red—so filled with repentant malice—that his lily petal was drawn toward the stakes they smoldered upon and the heaped glowing coals at their blackened feet that roasted their bones to charcoal. The mother howled as her flaming head whipped about. The father hissed lich-like as he reached—all aflame—forward to gnash with his glowing teeth at his judge, who was borne to him on the firestorm of his punishment.

The heat became so hot as to singe his fine downy beard and burn his face. The lily petal beneath his feet was shriveling from the inferno and was shaping into a hand, a large cadaverous hand that lifted him up above the cooling waters to cast him into the glowing coals of damnation…

“No, no! I only judged under duress.”

The room was hot and no longer had the superficial comfort of darkness as the moon had risen on a level with his window and illuminated its interior. He lay sweating in his light night gown upon his mat, his thin ringlets of scented hair, soaked in cinnamon-infused oil to ward off plague, ran with his gushing sweat.

Beside him lay his carafe of opium-tinted water, which helped set his mind at ease and repair the damage done to his health by the terrible dreams that had plagued him ever since the day among the eunuch gelding tents. He hurriedly took a gulp of the precious liquid and laid back on his side, in order to regard his patient, Shamballah Ali, who had lost first a thousand slaves to famine, than much of his mind to his financial ruin—and then an eye in the night while under this very roof. But somehow, since the loss of his eye, Shamballah Ali seemed content. He did not speak, but wore the most assured and serene expression upon his face as to make him a comfort.

‘I trust I did not wake you Shamballah.’

The man gave his only answer, the unblinking eye framed in a face that was a mask of peace.

The Mother of The Baby of the Lilies was only able to sleep under two conditions: opium sedation, and in the presence of Shamballah Ali, who just now regarded Abd al-Latif with his one unblinking eye. It was a curiosity to Abd al-Latif, as a doctor, that Shamballah Ali’s remaining eye no longer blinked, ever. The silent man did close it occasionally, for rest and perhaps lubrication. At this moment, on this hell-hot night in Ramadan, a night on which he had been unable to eat despite the prescribed fasting, the one unblinking eye of his patient regarded him, as if, oddly enough, Abd al-Latif were the patient and the one-eyed former slaver the doctor.

‘Another drink—yes of course, that will do it.’

He wet his lips again and let the curative nectar cool his mouth, and throat, and savored its descent into his aching body, a body that ached from remorse, its heart reminded of its every burden by the scent of charred hair and flesh that continued to perfume the Commandant’s duty house as the corpses of the damned smoldered into the night outside.

‘I must be up and away from this place—even if into the night.’

‘To be eaten yourself by the packs of rascals that roam the streets?’

‘Are you mad?’

‘Would that I were mad, so that the madness might claim my pain for its fury, or facilitate it’s entombment like Shamballa Ali here. His Madness has cured him after all. Being half mad he was in misery. But now that he is completely insane, he is at peace.’

‘Babyrs is bold unto reckless. Suggest a medical errand and he will take you forth into the night—say to check the night air for humors. Yes, I shall turn my own search for stench free air into a medical mission.’

He felt the need to inform his roommate and patient, who still reclined against the wall, gazing at him with unblinking compassion. “Shamballa Ali, I am off to scout the districts for good humored air, so to set up a healing and restorative station for those of us who abstain from detestable meats. I shall check in on you at daybreak.”

Abd al-Latif rose from his mat to gather his visiting robes about him, to done his cap, and to strap on his sandals. He looked down at Sina’s book by his mat, his constant companion in times of medical uncertainty. He resisted the temptation to take the book with him and noticed how this seemed to draw Shamballah’s one eye to the book as if it were a person to observe. He bid his roommate goodnight and stepped out into the more airy hallway on his way down to wake that beast Babyrs.

‘Perhaps my selfish impulse to smell fresh air might lead me to a cure for the plague—the coughing one at least. A map of how humors settle over Cairo in times of famine might be of untold use to a doctor attending the citizens under some like future conditions.'

'I say yes to that sentiment good doctor.’

He took his first step on the ladder to the ground floor, and it seemed to creak, ‘No, coward, no.’