“In A.D. 450 there was a famine in Italy in which parents ate their children.”

His head lolled a bit from side to side as he nodded to and fro upon the back of Niko’s donkey. The boy led off. Babyrs and the horseman known as ‘The Khwarzim’, who no one but the Commandant addressed by name, and then only in whispers, rode front and back on their snorting steeds, bold warhorses that liked the scent of fright and had trampled many a rascal to death since the advent of Aires and the coming of the flesh-eating plague.

Not a word was spoken. The warriors communicated by sign, signs that he knew not, word-pictures that were in no book.

‘I am naked and alone if robed and guarded, adrift like a wisp upon this foul breeze of death that covers Cairo.’

He was having some difficulty deciding where to go, or even where they were, and permitted Babyrs to lead the search for fresh air, a search he sensed that would lead Babyrs into uncomfortable territory. Abd al-Latif did not like the swaggering Turk.

‘I am faint yet awake. Why I could not fall from this saddle had I wished. That is it. I have, in my dream panic, drunk too deeply of my opium. Oh my, the city is alight with torches here and there under the twinkling stars and fallow moon. It is beautiful only because I am distant within.’

They rode along the raised road toward the Sultan’s palace, the distant scurry of rough feet lost in the shop-cluttered streets below. The air was beginning to take on a better scent up here. Niko then clicked as was his way to get his mounted master’s attention, and tapped Abd al-Latif’s saddle as well. There was the scuffling of feet, the cry of a girl, the snarl of a man.

A mighty bow creaked and then twanged like a song-note of doom. A screeching gurgling sound came up from below down a clear alley streaked by moonlight. The hooves of the warrior’s horses where then all a clatter, and the sounds of struggle and cursing ensued as Niko hurriedly led his donkey down into the alley, that just then seemed a hall of alabaster in a midnight paradise…

‘I am being led to Paradise by a Christian slave. This cannot be.’

He swayed slightly in the saddle as he came to consciousness under the bright moon.

Niko held his reigns.

Babyrs, slouching like a Turkopole avatar of death on horseback, framed a row of wretches in the moonlight—one fat well-dressed one transfixed through his belly with a barbed Turkish arrow. The bleeding was such that the man had little time—he recognized this man, it was Abdulla Ali, personal physician to the Sultan’s Ladies in Waiting, who beseeched Abd al-Latif for mercy with his eyes, for he could not speak.

Next to him was a whimpering and frightened black, an eunuch of the harim, who kept watch over the Ladies in Waiting. This fat and nearly naked fellow regarded the three mounted men with fear, darting his bug eyes from this one to that, and then back, in dreadful anticipation. The eunuch did have a curved dagger in the felt sash that girdled his hips above his skirt. This man had left the harim in a hurry, without donning his robes.

Next to this fellow cowered a young khol-eyed beauty, in a dainty shift. By her breasts she was lactating well, though her baby did not feed but rather hid between her exposed breasts which she was using to shelter the child’s head. By her beauty and her motherly state, she was certainly a favorite of the Sultan.

‘They all await you. All eyes in this drama are upon me—a doctor, overmedicated in the night, who knows not where he is.’

Niko nudged his foot and he spoke to the woman, “Lady, bring your baby here so that I may examine it. I am the doctor who cured the Sultan’s eldest child last year.”

The woman scampered to him on her bare knees, tearing the skin from her knees and legs and snarling in her fury as she held the baby up to show that it had fingernail scrapes and a man’s handprint bruise.

“These fiends have tried to seize my baby, to sell it to that rich bitch who is eating the young over in the private quarter. My sister overheard them conspiring so I fled and they ran me down. My breasts are bruised, my legs raked, but my baby girl is well. They will not eat my baby!”

‘I must make room for her on this donkey.’

As he dismounted he said to Niko, “Hoist her and her child in my place.”

The sound of his face smacking on the stone flag came dully in the night as did her yelp of surprise.

He vaguely recalled rising and swaying on his feet, next to a beauty perched on his donkey. Blood ran from his chin but he felt no pain.

Babyr’s was snarling at Niko, “Now take his knife and gut the old goat.”

The reigns of his donkey were being held by the broad hand of he who was known as ‘The Khwarzim’ who towered on his Arabian stallion above the woman in his black turban and dark coat of mail.

The eunuch had an arrow through his head, glassy eyes moonward in death, and Abdulla Ali’s eyes bulged in terror as the donkey boy, with shaking hand, took the eunuch’s curved dagger and placed the point to his heart with Babyr’s cruel encouragement, “That’s it boy, now push!”

Niko looked back over his shoulder at Abd al-Latif, who understood, after the case of the Secretary to the Vizier, that official punishments could not be brought against the class of people who attended the Sultan. The scene was being arranged to depict the eunuch as the murderer of the doctor who had heroically attempted to save the girl. Abd al-Latif gave the nod, and felt the woe-sandaled feet of his ghost take one more step on the sorrow-lined path to hell.