The look on Uzbin’s face was of anger at this wicked boy. He drew his knife with a hissing curse, “Damned ungrateful cur-pup!”

The beggar man who pilfered battlefields by night then gave a startled look as the curved knife cleared its ornate brass scabbard crusted in jewels—quite a contrast to the filthy rags he wore. He looked bug-eyed at the knife, held out before him at arm’s length. Anger then turned to fear, and fear to terror. He looked searchingly at Ibrahm. Whatever Uzbin saw in Ibrahm, he did not appear by his horrified gaze to be looking into the eyes of a naked one-eyed Jew-boy slave, lost on the way to Cairo with a swan quill in his hand.

“Please jinn, please! I knew not! I have a hidey hole of gold behind a block in the Pyramid—the big one!”

“We are thirsty.”

“No!” whimpered Uzbin, as he kneeled to bring his face level with the boy’s.

“No!” he whimpered again as he raised the knife above his own neck and tears streaked his dirty cheeks like rivulets of mud preceding a flood.

“No!” he whimpered as he plunged the knife into his own neck.

He convulsed and drew the blade out, letting it drop to the hardened earth. Whatever Uzbin had been he was loyal food, for he craned his spurting neck so that the blood would run like a fountain into the open mouth of We Ibrahm.

Their body felt like the dry land soaking up the first rain, like a water lily drinking of the River of Life. We Ibrahm became one with We Uzbin even as the failing husk of the loyal food body paled, shrank away, and stopped spurting its gift. We Ibrahm looked to the blazing sky and saw the void beyond, flew past the moon where she swam in her Midnight Sea. He sailed like a sailor on that eternal Midnight Sea for the distant stars, but Earth wrapped her tendrils about his star-bound ankles and drew him to her…

…back he tumbled, a cipher of life, a beggar boy born to a farmer whose wife hated him. Watering wheat too distant from the canal to taste the bounty of the bucket occupied his early years—chasing field mice as well. A door mouse was once his friend, until it was killed by a cat, which he killed in revenge—his father’s prize rat-killing cat…

…Alone across the face of the world was a hard life for a boy. He hid in canals by day and crawled through the fields by night, eating onions and garlic and other things that would not be missed at a glance. In this way he grew into youth, becoming a fleet thief of things mostly not wanted…

…saw the great army of Saladin and he followed. Making himself useful by carrying things for foot soldiers, he was tolerated and knew the safety of a war camp. Up into the Syrian lands they went. After the first battle he found his calling, crawling, picking and choosing across the moaning expanse of the midnight after-battlefield. He learned the art of bartering things for coin, of stashing things and coin in hidey holes, of the tricks of memory that permitted one to map the pillaged world of booty caches in his mind…

…the soldier had a fine necklace which he admired—then the sounds of his toes being sliced off, the pain in his foot, the glare from the savage Frank who he had thought to be dead. He made off with the necklace at the cost of three toes, and ever after chose stealthier ways, and kept an eye out for a partner when practical…

…ached with hunger, hid from the flesh-eaters at night and searched abandoned dwellings by day. It had been a long hungry famine—the dust stings my eyes, the powdered feces beat the ground…what a nice boy he seems. Perhaps I might teach him the trade and have someone to look after me in my old years, so quickly do they come…

Ibrahm heard his eyes open as his heart seemed to move his very chest. He looked down at his new friend Uzbin to see that he had killed himself with his own dagger, and stared up into the unforgiving sun with a look of pained amazement, as if angry at Ibrahm for not stopping him. The blood had spurted so thick and misty that he could still taste it in the air, indeed had been splashed by some.

“Oh, that is Master al-Latif’s quill.”

Taking the quill from the greasy blood splashed turban of his erstwhile partner, Ibrahm turned to continue on his way to Cairo. Then he heard the weeping of a bird—if indeed birds could weep—beyond the outbuilding among the circle of huts Uzbin had meant to investigate.

‘I should investigate.’

‘No, I should leave.’

‘It sounds like a bird weeps. Birds are my friends. The Baby Caliph in my dream had bird friends.’

Ibrahm rounded the corner of the outbuilding and was hit with the stench of death. This was nothing new to one who had lived in Cairo over the past year, though it did trouble a boy in out of the wild.

‘There is nothing left but to walk ahead.’