“I swear by God, Lord of life and death…and I swear by Asclepius, and I swear by all the saints of God…to do no harm…”

The officer’s table had made an excellent examination platform. At long last Abdul Matin’s noteworthy friend had arrived from Cairo. He was not, however in complete and vigorous health; quite the contrary, exhausted and battered as he was.

His cheek was burned, his nose broken, his shoulder sliced open, and his body so badly bruised over all that he seemed much like a fruit that had hung for too long and then fallen. Yusuf bin Yiju was his name, and he did not seem to care about his injuries for so long as Beadra acted as his nurse.

‘She is my cute little Christian slave man. Have some honor and do not entirely undress her with your lust-inflamed eyes.’

As was usual for him, Abd al-Latif thought somewhat more critically of those around him than he was willing to articulate. He made to speak to the battered man as Beadra dressed the spear wound that he had just cleansed with brine and closed with silk thread. But as Abd al-Latif made his way around the table from its head so that he could speak clearly to the fellow, the man simply rolled his head to admire the curve of her hip.

‘All the innocents who have died horribly at flesh-eating hands, and this beastly fool survives only to pursue folly in the form of Beadra’s infidel charms!’

He placed a doctoring hand on the man’s shoulder to get his attention, and when this did not work was moved by impulse to check the setting of the nose for stability with a flick of his forefinger.

‘The man turned his head in the proper direction with an angry gleam in his bruised blood-filled eyes for the good doctor that had mended him free of charge, so Abd al-Latif felt compelled to justify his final ministration.

“Yes, that nose should mend passably well, with only enough of a dent to make you look dashing.”

The man’s misplaced anger washed away like dirty water and he grinned, “How about the arm doctor? I have lost my bow. But if I should acquire one I would like to be able to draw it.”

“The muscle was not completely severed and should heal fine. The numbness from the spear haft, and what seems to have been a fall, might plague you from time to time, perhaps returning in old age. You are a robust man Yusuf, and as well-counted for seeing through adversity as Abdul Matin claimed when he recommended you.”

The man was already arrogant, prone and wounded as he was. The mere news that he would heal had brought him back to the hubris of his adventurous kind. “Where is that goat-sucker Doctor?”

“He is seeing to your sturdy pony out in the stables. It is his specialty here in Cairo.”

Yusuf sneered, but then softened his look when he spied Beadra turning toward the carafe stand which he had appropriated for his dressing table. “If I ever get another arrow in my ass I trust you are there to do the work. Abdul should be relegated to nursing rats and dogs. I don’t even know if I trust him with my mount.”

‘Behold the shameless ogling! This ruffian has no sense of propriety. Look you, that is my Beadra there!’

Abd-al Latif slid around the table and placed himself between the bandit that Abdul incomprehensibly seemed so admiring of and Beadra’s pleasing form.

“Beadra, see to the Mother of the Baby and to Shamballa Ali too. One measure of paste to each.”

“Yes Master,” came her sweet reply.

‘You see ruffian, it is I she calls Master, not you.’

As she walked off with her dressing tray Yusuf tried to rise up for a parting view and met his good doctor’s restraining hand. “Continue to recline Yusuf. Your brain has been jarred and you must lay still.”

‘How has this man lived a week, subject as he is to his insensate yearnings, let alone the thirty odd years he seems to have passed making ill-considered decisions in the wilder places of the world?

‘But to be so strong—if stupid—for one day of my life…why then Beadra might have eyes for me…’

…He came back to life to the rough sound of Yusuf’s voice, the voice he could feel reverberating through his hand, which was still pressed upon his chest. “Doctor, I appreciate your work, and your admiration—and have nothing, strictly speaking against love between men...”

‘Oh God!’

Flushed with shame Abd al-Latif—realizing he had just had another dreaming spell—recovered his composure as vigorously as he might. “But of course warrior. I have spells you see—an affliction brought on by the baby-eating curse. I have been able to save so few. I simply pray on occasion that I might one day be a man of such physical strength as you, so I can do more than pick up the pieces of so many broken lives. Alas, it is beyond me, for I have been frail since childhood. The very medicines I use to cure the darkly dreaming mind, afflict the waking body so…”

Yusuf’s face came into focus, seemingly haunted itself, and the man spoke with a hurt tenderness that did not seem to fit his bold features, “Five children and a baby eaten I have seen with these eyes, and I have slain the vile whore and the savage hag responsible. A baby was snatched from beneath my very eyes and eaten alive before I could act. I have sworn to the mother of that baby to slay all of the flesh-eaters. I must. I must…”

The bold man weakened and seemed to drift off into a waking dream, staring at the white wall as if it held a moral that could not be fathomed.

The ‘shink’ of mail and the creak of leather, accompanied by the ‘clunk’ of hard-heeled boots, announced a military visitor, striding down the hall. He stepped away from his patient and turned, and his patient, a man familiar with, and apparently ill-at-ease with, the jangle of military harness slid from the table to his feet, standing naked except for his linen loin wrap.

Through the archway walked The Khwarizm; the unspeaking warrior; the faceless man; said to be an agent of the Caliph in Bagdad, sent to Cairo to assess the Sultan’s military preparedness versus the Franks. Strangely enough, this agent seemed more interested in the famine and the flesh-eaters than how many horsemen the Sultan might muster should the murdering Franks appear in the Land of the Nile.

Beneath the black length of turban that draped his face, there hung a veil of silver mesh. His weapons were strange and said to be of Indian manufacture. This man was universally feared. He spoke only to the Commandant and the Sultan, and never so that he could be heard. The men he led acted according to the military hand signs he preferred to use for communication.

Abd al-Latif felt as if the cipher of a man approved of him somehow. Or was this merely wishful thinking? For any person other than the Commandant and the Sultan the occasion of a visit from The Khwarizm was an occasion to mark—or perhaps to dread. But his appearance in the doorway was laid to insignificance as soon as he stepped aside, sentinel like, and permitted the bizarre human menagerie that trailed him to enter.

A tall, well-formed, and entirely naked, black woman, with a badly broken ankle, a terrible bite to her breast and many tooth and claw marks about her once beautiful body, entered. Her eyes had about them the glow of the mesmerist, the magnetism of the prophet, the distance of the dervish after his dance. By her figure she was a former flesh-house girl who had moved on to wet-nursing, for which she was admirably well-equipped. On her left breast she held a little white baby, a baby with eyes like a daylight winter moon over the Caspian, eyes that looked not to his mother, but to Abd al-Latif.

‘I am lost and found all at once!’

In her battered right hand, with fingernails mashed by some mallet or club, she held the massive head of an eunuch, a head that had one eye recently torn away, the remaining one glazed fixedly at an inconceivably distant point with glassy fright. Behind the woman groveled Tuman, the Fisherman of Tennis, mumbling prayers under his breath. Yusuf, for his part, was animated to an irrational passion by the sight of the baby, and besides, seemed incapable of keeping his mouth shut. “You saved one girl, saved a baby from the flesh-eaters?”

The baby regarded Yusuf with the eyes of a cobra and the dauntless man stepped back and away until the baby turned its gaze once again on Abd al-Latif, and those eyes turned to the blue of a moon-hung winter day again.

The woman spoke to Abd al-Latif, “You are the Doctor of Babies, the Good Doctor who proclaims against the Flesh-eaters?”

He cried—a less fitting answer than he had imagined in those times when he had considered the possibility of such praise. He shivered as well, to the serene timbre of this girl’s voice.

“Mistress Ebil, the renowned horseman Abibyub’s wife, Mistress to this dog.” she intoned in her musical accent as she tossed the grisly object to Yusuf with a commanding glare “That evil woman has dined on the last twenty-one babies of the poor, and seven of the eight babies of Master Efran’s house. They say you speak for the Commandant on matters of famine and flesh-eating.”

He shivered again.

“I do woman, when he is off on duty, such as he is today.”

‘And may he find Ibrahm and Ibis to help patch the hole in this leaking soul.’

The baby blinked, and seemed to regard him more softly, with less radiance. The nameless woman, as if she were the Queen of Sheba, her untoward manner mysteriously tolerated by them all, continued with one finger pointed at Yusuf.

“Master Efran sold babies for flesh-eating, sold flesh of his flesh into abomination.”

Abd al-Latif, faint with the weight of decision, looked to Yusuf. “The Commandant has decreed that such folk burn, unless of Rich means. Efran is merely a whoremonger.”

Yusuf spoke up, as if his wounds had all healed within. “If the Khwarizm permits me to draw a fresh mount and arms, I might accompany him. I know Efran’s house, his hiding holes, his escape doors.”

The Khwarizm nodded to Yusuf, and he was off, head in hand, snapping his boots and burnt clothes up from the floor as nonchalantly as a doctor carrying his medical case and books.

The woman then looked to Abd al-Latif. “And Mistress Ebil?”

“Such people of Good Class are taken before the Sultan. Her husband will no doubt be fined, she most likely imprisoned for life. Our Turkish contingent rounds up the staff of flesh-eating households. They will be interrogated by the Commandant at the stakes—many to experience the fate of the damned before the actual entrance to that abode.”

The Khwarizm bowed to Abd al-Latif and stalked out with old Tuman following behind.

‘She is an angel in heathen guise.’

They stood alone regarding one another, the three of them.

“I would examine and treat your wounds, and those of the baby. He is surely the last baby in Cairo not of the privileged classes of people. What is your name nurse?”

She walked up to him, her foot flapping by the tendons and ligaments that held it to the broken bone of the lower leg, placed the baby in his arms, looked deeply into his eyes, and then kissed him passionately with her full soft lips, the only part of her seemingly undamaged. She then held his face in her hands as her great breasts brushed his gown. Her voice was more a breeze than an articulation, or at least so he thought, and so he would muse into his old age, “I was Suvee, the Bird of Mourning. A bird returns to her Mother Tree.”

She kissed him again, this time in a more serpentine way with the tongue.

‘This is rather nice treatment. I should perhaps consider companionship.’

Suvee stepped back on her good food, bent from the waist as she raised the broken foot, and set it with a crunch and a click, as expertly as any doctor might. She then stood her weight gently on the swollen and bruised foot, gave a satisfied nod to herself, bowed to Abd al-Latif, and walked off, with two terrible canine wounds apparent on her rump.

She then stopped at the doorway, turned and regarded him, and said sagely, in her pleasing accent, “You should perhaps consider companionship.”

With those words she was gone, and somehow he knew in his heart that he should not follow.