“In the province of Lang-yeh residents ate human flesh.”

Niko happy with his fish, Tuman comforted by the thought of this kind doctor taking him in, Babyrs pleased with the burning alive of the loud-mouthed dung-seller, and Abd al-Latif, seeming to have rediscovered his purpose, all made their way with improved spirits, despite the oppressive heat of noon, to the Commandant’s duty house.

As they approached Niko spoke up, “Master, should we go around back so you don’t have to see the bodies on the stakes?”

Babyrs was eying him with suspicion of unmanliness and the promise of open disdain if he chose the squeamish route. Buoyed somewhat by his slight smear of poppy paste, feeling right with God again, Abd al-Latif smiled to Niko and spoke like a master should, “Niko, Tuman has travelled all the way up from the sea under great hardship to see his family avenged against the flesh-eaters, let us review the Stakes of Punishment.”

Babyrs blinked at him knowingly, smirked, and then sneezed, “Hashishan!”

‘This man is insufferable.’

Babyr’s then reigned in besides Abd al-Latif, who sat his little donkey, towering over him on his savage charger, and pretended to stifle another make believe sneeze. “Dear Doctor al-Latif, might you have anything for my summer cold?”

‘An overdose of hellebore I should think!’

The man then flashed his thick-toothed grin and rode ahead around the corner and waited at the end of the paved street before the duty house that Abd al-Latif had not had the courage to view for days now.

As they assembled at the end of the paved way, he was assaulted by the scent of charred flesh burnt to bone. Before them, to the right arranged before the various shops that had catered to the garrison’s needs, when there were things to be sold and bartered, stood a long row of stakes—posts really, cut of mature palm trunks. The Commandant was there with his men, and nodded respectfully to them. Babyrs took their leave to report briefly to the Commandant, and was then off to the stables.

Niko chirped, “Master can I count them! Ibrahm has been teaching me numbers. Can I practice counting the stakes of the flesh-eaters?”

He nodded ‘yes’ as he dismounted and the boy went off leading the donkey, merrily counting the stakes, many of which had charred bodies still tied to them. As he walked up to the Commandant he stopped at each stake to steel himself for the struggle ahead, and made his gaze meet the tortured faces of those who were burned alive for eating their fellow men.

‘Oh God, they have come here too!’

As he stopped before one burned wretch, who had been dined on down to the bone by fiends in the night, the Commandant’s voice boomed, “They come by night to feast on their fellow flesh-eaters. All of the hyenas of the black lands could not be so foul toward one another as these. Babyrs and the other Turks will be on the wall by night to feather them with arrows. We will start the morning burnings then.”

Tuman screeched, raced forward, and kneeled before a stake, upon which a charred woman of late middle-years had been burned. Her flesh had been avoided by the midnight feasters. Her eyes had melted into her head defiantly by the cast of her lids.

The Commandant came close and looked at the weeping fisherman who knelt and wrung his hands before the burned woman. And al-Latif whispered up over the warrior's mailed shoulder, “A fisherman of Tennis, the last to come in, looking for his family. He has seen a thing in the marsh that confirms my suspicion that the vile flesh-eating humors that wafted down the Nile last year instead of the life-giving fertility, did seek, and has found a Christian expression: a black sorcerer accompanied by Crusading Franks. He also knows the location of the Moroccan roasting pit.”

Tuman was now snarling and punching the charred corpse, off of which flakes of charcoal dust rained. The Commandant watched with interest, “That vile old bitch was found selling her daughter to the grave robbers for meat, and was known to have eaten her own grandchildren. Must have been quite a woman among the low, for they skipped her by last night and ate on this old hag here instead—another grandchild eater.”

The two guards were looking back and forth from Tuman to the Commandant, expecting some order. The Commandant nodded them off and spoke, “Fisherman who was she?”

The man turned with tear-filled eyes and cried, “My mother-in-law! The old witch talked my wife and children upriver to this pesthole.”

The Commandants voice rumbled, “A pesthole it has become. I need you to go with The Khwarzim to the roasting pit and point out the evildoers and flesh-eaters. Will that wet your taste for vengeance?”

The man shook with rage, “Yes Lord-Master, Yes!”

The Commandant nodded to the two guards and they guided Tuman away—Tuman 'the kind' who now seemed not to remember Doctor al-Latif. They walked down past Niko, who was using his fingers and his toes, and even donkey parts, as mnemonic aids in his quest to count all 72 stakes.

Abd al-Latif felt grave as he finally admitted to the loss of the horseman’s baby before the Commandant, “The Baby of the Lilies was taken by vile means while you were on the punitive raid. Shamballah Ali lost his eye by way of this same blasphemous deception, of which I am embarrassed to speak. I feared that midnight horror had broken my mind as well and was spiraling into apathy like my colleagues. Then this fisherman came to me in the street…and, I saw God’s hand in things again.”

The Commandant, who was surely less confident here than he must have been at Acre, to have slain so many Franks under Saladin, maintained his confident tone, that tone that did so much for a doctor’s spirit at a time like this when so very few can be saved by the medical arts. “Doctor, if The Deceiver has truly crawled up out of his smoking hole, then he, like some prophet that claims to be one-with-God, may be smitten and slain in form. Before sorcery, the jihadist does not falter. Those gutter rascals obeyed this witch as a flesh-eating prophetess. And here she smokes, just another torch to light the jihad way.”