“Chinese law permits the eating of human flesh, and this flesh is sold publicly in the markets…’

Niko led Abd al-Latif up Small Fish-seller’s Street off the Market Way, as there was still some small quantity of fish being sold at very dear prices. The merchants and their guards outnumbered those who came to haggle over the price of their next meal. The servants of some very well-to-do folk were about. Nowhere though, did one see a woman with a child in tow or an infant in bundling.

‘Are the children all perished and eaten?’

‘Of course not fool. The good ladies simply adhere to your advice concerning locking away their young.’

Niko, ever active and jolly it seemed, piped up, “Master have you chosen to travel up this way to purchase some fish for dinner?”

“Niko, it was you who chose the route, I simply accented.”

The boy looked back at him with two raised eyebrows, “So you thought that fish smelled good after the camel dung, and were glad that Niko just happen to wander up through the fish-seller’s stalls! Smell the salted white fish Master!”

Effectively managed by one of his supposed servants once again, he tossed Niko his palm purse. “Niko mind to purchase enough for the Commandant, myself, and you as well. We will make a show of you learning table service and you might snack under the table. I will not have you causing jealousy in the kitchen by the mastication of delectables before the other slaves. Be discreet—and make it the traveler’s flakes so that no cooking is required lest the witch in the kitchen come chiding me.”

He glided down to the hard-packed street before the stalls and absently stroked the mane of the donkey as he watched Niko haggle with the old cuss who handled the salt fish.

‘Eyes are upon me. I can feel it.’

‘Do not be superstitious man! Have you lost your mind?’

‘Slowly but surely I am, and if I turn to confront this hackle-hair gaze yet another shard of my fragile sanity shall be shattered!’

‘Watch the wily boy spend your coin.’

‘Stroke the mane of this loyal beast.’

‘Be calm without reaching for the poppy paste in your medical bag.’

‘Feel the breath of God—no!’

A hot moist breath, breath that smelled sweetly of unattended tooth decay, wet his neck at the base of his ear, chilling his entire being. Afraid to turn and look into the eyes of the Baby of the Lilies, he stared ahead and clenched his teeth.

‘Merciful God preserve my faltering soul.’

The breath was accompanied by wetly whispered words, “Good Doctor, are you he who attends the Commandant in the matter of the flesh-eaters?”

He felt near to passing out and still feared to turn and look.

“I am Abd al-Latif, doctor attending the will of the Commandant in the matter of the famine and associated plagues, as well as seeing to the health of the good class of mothers and their babies.”

A hunched and wiry man stepped before him—a man recently hunched by an injury to the upper back it appeared. By his look and his smell he was a fisherman of the delta, and recently come upriver.

‘Get hold of your wits doctor.’

“You are injured my man—and of the reed fisherman. I thought all of your kind came in by the time Aires was nigh. What was your mishap?”

The man had a narrow cast to his face, having more of the antiquitous Egyptian about him than the Arab. His eyes were steady but deeply set and haunted, or so he thought. The man was calm, easy, and strong of bearing despite his starved state and obvious injury. His tone had a hint of loss before the words emerged, “Never mind the back, Doctor. I have searched high and low and even under the terrible earth and the ashes of the Moroccan’s very pit of sinful feast, for my son, and wife, and daughter, came here before the sign of Aquarius at the behest of my fool-bitch mother-in-law. I have found them not these two months and know the truth though it not be told. So I stand in your shadow offering the key to hell—should you care to look, for I have found the door Doctor, and I know you to minister to minds and souls as much as to bodies.”

He shook visibly before he spoke and the man seemed to understand that they had a shared vision of horror, and leant a comforting hand to his elbow. This felt fatherly in a way, despite the man’s low class, and made it easier for Abd al-Latif to speak his heart.

“You have spied upon me then?”

“It takes no spy to learn of the ‘Good Baby Doctor’ who says, ‘Lock up your baby and bar the door.’ I came by the Commandant’s looking for such a doctor who might have treated and pronounced on my family. The guard took me to the portal to speak with a Christian slave girl who said only that you were not about. Then a strange one-eyed man walked toward me like the very dead, and said, “He seeks you Fisherman of Tennis!”

‘God find me where I fall!’

“Then, sure as any spy would be that he who sought a fisherman would come to where the fisherman brought his catch, I came here, awaiting a man in sky-blue doctor’s gown and oiled locks as has been spoken of so kindly. I am Tuman, fisherman and hunter of the reeds below Tennis—last of my kind to give up his lifeway and journey here to this pestilential place.”

“What need do you have of me Tuman?”

‘I should not have asked.’

The man withdrew his hand and used it to rub his head, which of a sudden seemed to pain him. His voice came in a frantic whisper, “Doctor my mind aches and I must speak of it. Upon arriving at the conclusion that my dear family has been eaten by the fetid occupants of this deathly town I made to drown myself in the mud of the canal. As I plunged my face into the filthy waters and meant to drink my death I was then grabbed by hands—hands that made known to me by some means other than the spoken word, that they numbered forty, and that they owned the night!”

The world of bare stalls, tired awnings, haggard donkeys, haggling merchants, brawny guards, of distant flat-roofed buildings and of ivory white minarets, all lit in a nice glowing tint by the reddish late morning sun of Ramadan, began to spin; to turn in upon itself, and to became a whirlpool of sorts, a whirlpool in which he occupied the lowest point, in which he became the water that was sucked through the thirsty drain—that was not a drain at all, but a cataract to hell…

The distant voice of He-who-cared echoed insensibly down to him as he was drawn to damnation.