“This mania for eating other people become so common among the poor that the majority of them perished that way... Among these rascals there were some who used all kinds of tricks and pretexts to entice men, unsuspectingly, to their homes.”

He was a small man, a stone mason by trade, with big hands and sharp eyes and a stern way. His image often came to mind when Yusuf was troubled; the man that had taught him to work; who had taught him to obey; who had taught him to stand before his Master, and ‘let the storm pass’; his father.

But the ‘storm’ had not passed. Father was eaten by four famished hounds of man size, with great munching tearing jaws, that ripped off first his hands and feet, and then tore out his belly and loins, not ripping apart his throat and letting him die until the Hound-master cracked his whip. While Mother was taken into their house by their Christian Master—never to speak again—little Yusuf had been held by the Hound-master’s boys and made to watch while Father was eaten down to the bone—even his head cracked open with the Hound-master’s stave to permit ravenous jaws to get at the brains.

Father’s death sentence was their Master’s lesson for his boy, to be ever obedient to Master’s sons. But Yusuf was different. He would never work a day, would never obey without plotting disobedience; would never stand before his betters when he could skulk or bolt away, would never let a ‘storm’ pass without spitting into the wind…

Yusuf and El Frank made their way at a slow cantor down into the ‘colonies’. The people of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Granada had a tight knit community of sorts. They gathered here to report as spies, to reside as ambassadors, to work as merchants, to visit other scholars for those of that inclination, and for a half-assed veterinarian like Abdul Matin, to charade as a doctor. In this quarter of wily travelers he would find the information he needed to locate that rat Abdul, who had probably moved up to the Public Quarter where the sycophants to the Sultan gathered at his slippered feet, upon their groveling knees.

For Abdul Matin had sent a pigeon to Yusuf at Alexandria under the sign of Aires, that Yusuf’s skills were needed in Cairo. He had wiped his ass with the note and had thrown it to the sea wind with a drowning curse. But after he had slain the flesh-eating whore for feeding him vile stew—here he was, in this hell pit…

The stables in this quarter were attached to the housing, as these men were of the travelling variety. Even if settled for years they hosted pilgrims and their agents who brought in the information and the goods that made the Berbers, and the half-Arab mongrels of the West, so valuable here in the ancient land of Misr.

Since converting to Islam in his youth he became determined to live in far lands where he could pass for a half-Arab, as opposed to staying in Granada where he would be known as a Jew who came to submission from Christian bondage. He had not been a pious Jew, and was not a pious Muslim. Rather religious affiliation was, for Yusuf bin Yiju, a risk-limiting and opportunity-enhancing tool. He should have changed his name, but had not been able to let go of his childhood that completely. Hence he avoided its use among strangers—preferring they name him.

He passed no street barricades though there were armed guards patrolling in twos, who saluted him as a horseman; for that was the distinction that mattered most among men, although all would publicly say it was Muslim status.

Civil society was yet alive in this quarter, on the roof tops, in the curtained doorways, and within the lantern-lit rooms behind the lime-bleached walls. Two Syrian guardsmen—private bully boys to the colonists who plied their trade here—were leading a naked bloody-headed wretch along by a neck lead, like one used to wrangle leopards in the Atlas Range and wolves wherever they might be found—mostly in Christian lands where they belonged he supposed. Wolves, and their hairy-faced image and long munching snout, had always been a peculiar terror of his since his childhood and the murder of his family by the Butcher Lord of Navarre, who employed great wolf-like dogs to drive Jews like Yusuf’s father from their lands.

He must have been staring at the wretch, for it spat at him, before it was dragged off at a rougher pace.