“A great many of the poor had retreated to the Isle of Raudha, where they remained hidden in earthen huts and watched out for passers-by whom they could abduct…”

The Isle of Raudha was close across the Tannic Nile where the mighty river branched Northeast to dwindle and die off in various dead ends, and in some cases make its way to the Middle Sea. At this point, at the river’s lowest ebb, a child could wade across certain portions of the stretch of river that faced the island. The Khwarzim and his Misrian Arab horsemen could be seen up the Tannic Road, waiting to cut down any rascals who might fly up that way across the narrow neck before the reeds began. If they wished to swim out into the main branch with the crocodiles, so be it.

Yusuf rode to the right of Babyrs, three Turks to his own right. To Babyr’s left rode Subtyz, his henchman, and three more Turks, all armed with their bows, all on black Turkish ponies, a little taller, but not broader than, El Frank. Yusuf had never recovered his own bow, and the blasted Turks would not let him draw from their spares to arm himself. He rode El Frank with his long knife in his right hand and his reigns in his left.

A few darting figures could be seen beneath the weeping trees and behind the lumpy outlines of the mud huts, from whence these rascals had been sallying forth to ambush travelers. The island was fully the size of Cairo, but fairly featureless. With much of the population migrating northeast along the so-called ‘Harvesters Sickle Road’ that paralleled the Tannic Nile, and then up along the table of dead land that rose above the Valley of the Nile, this was regarded as the last abode of the flesh-eating poor. The rich still feasted upon people discretely behind the walls of Cairo. But the poor, they had flocked here to dine upon unsuspecting travelers.

‘Oh we can’t have that! What would good people think?’

This Sultan was a son of Saladin with a good war record. Since the famine he had largely left the running of the city to his Vizier and the Commandant. He spent his months traveling and checking on his borders and the conditions of his lands. It was crucial that the trade he encouraged continued to flow throw his home city.

'So these mud-sucking rascals had to go.'

The Khwarzim and his two score riders on their tall Arabians had just reached the blocking point. Babyrs and his eight never slowed down when they hit the Nile, not a fraction of its full depth, or even of its usual depth this time of year. Just before they hit the water at a walk, Babyr’s snarled, “Let’s catch them snoozing in their mud holes.”

They walked until they hit the channel—where a child would have been swept off his little feet and drowned—and then El Frank was in his element, the best swimming pony he had ever known of, as competitive as his master, swimming out ahead of the Turkish mounts. A chill went up Yusuf’s spine and he admonished his partner in crime, “You are about to get me shot in the back. The damned Turks like me not!”

El Franks swam the quicker, as if to tell him to mind his own business; that it was his balls that the crocodiles would snip off if they took their Turkish time. Within moments they were wading again and Yusuf decided if an arrow in a back was coming it might as well be at range. He bit El Frank’s ear as he did at such times as he required a serious burst of speed, and they were off, leaving the cursing Turks in their wake.

‘That’s it boy, run me down a mud-sucker!”

The nine of them were pounding up the banks past hiding slits, and then past mud huts and bone pits stacked with bones by type to each pit. The place showed signs of mass habitation, with piles of human excrement heaped above the cook-pits where it was left to dry in the sun for use as fuel.

A mud-sucker darted out before him, and being in the lead, they gave chase. “Run by him so I can put the knife to him boy!”

El Frank quickly overtook the rascal and brought Yusuf abreast of the fleeing mud-streaked bundle of rags. The ugly hag looked over her shoulder at him with a rat-like urgency in her eyes and he raised his blade for the decapitating stroke. As his blade swung back for the stroke an arrow transfixed the greasy mud-caked head and she went down.

‘Seven hells to that! I’m glad I didn’t bring a bow. This would be right embarrassing.’

He looked to his left and saw another two mud-suckers pop up out of their holes and veer toward the deep Nile. The right wing of their formation rode them down swiftly.

Looking up ahead as El Frank almost got Yusuf’s head ripped off by a skinning station pole where these nasty folk had been hanging people up by their ankles and butchering them, he spied three pop up out of their holes. Two went right and he took the left-hand rascal, a younger male by his stride, a youth. Babyr’s yelled to him, “Capture that sprat Piss Pants while we drive the rest toward the Khwarzim.

‘I see. So I am the jailor, and this my jailhouse donkey. Piss Pants might one day have a word for you Babyrs—one day.’

El Frank was on the rascal’s tail in moments. This mud-sucker was carrying something in his hands, held before his belly, yet was very fast. He did not look back but hurried along, dodging among huts, holes, pits, and excrement heaps with such agility that he began to gain Yusuf’s respect. Finally they neared the water where this mud-sucker was determined to cross, where the water became deep as evidenced by the choppy current where the north run of the Tannic Branch fed back into itself.

“Across this—Oh Kismet’s shit! Crocodiles!”

A skirmish line of crocodile snouts faced them out in deep water. The reeds on the far bank offered sanctuary to this rascal if he could make it.

‘I can’t let this bastard go. I’ll never hear the end of it!’

He spurred El Frank on to get ahead of the youth at the water’s edge, yelling, “You won’t make it kid. The crocs will eat you alive. Come with me and it’s a quick death. I’ll slit your throat before they burn you, on my honor bo—Got you, you little shit!”

El Frank turned broadside before the boy in ankle deep mud, and Yusuf pointed his long knife and—said nothing, for he was struck dumb.

The youth had his toothless mouth open like a black pit, and something like a hollow wind blew from it, rather than words. Yusuf found himself looking into the face of a boy without a nose, with teeth gone from his mouth making it a blackened pit, and two hollow eye sockets from which eyes had long ago been gouged. Yet, the eyes looked through him, as if to some far destination. Most disturbing was what the boy carried between his hands: a skull, a cleaned human skull fashioned into something of a round box with the jaw serving as a lid. Within the skull was a trove of treasure, a treasure of terrible sort, a trove of recently gouged eyes.

‘Stand your ground before this devil—defy the horror, do not shrink before it!’

El Frank stood strongly as did his rider.

The youth stopped, sniffed the air with what was now a snort hole, looked as if he was hearing a call from far off, and ran at them. As Yusuf braced to impale the monster on his knife the thing who had once been a boy leaped clear over man and horse into the river beyond. Turning to look over his other shoulder, Yusuf saw the boy land on his feet in knee deep water and then walk out into the river. He walked until the water covered his head, raising the skull full of eyes high overhead.

‘The crocs will get him boy. Just watch and see.”

Minutes later, as Babyr’s splashed his mount down beside his the crocodiles could be seen parting for the set of skinny hands holding the sun-bleached skull. Moments later the youth emerged from the water carrying his skull, walking past a crocodile that bathed on the far shore, and disappearing like a shadow into the waving reeds.

The Turk said with a deadened tone, “That is the damndest thing I have ever seen.”

Yusuf looked at him with eyes haunted far beyond fright. “You wouldn’t say that if you had seen his face, or what he hauled in that skull.”

Babyrs actually sounded reasonable for once as he considered the distant reeds. “My ancestors believed that the sky over the open steppe was heaven and that such places as this were mouthways into Hell.”

Yusuf shrugged his shoulders fatalistically, “It seems the only people that ever know anything are our ancestors, and they’re all dead.”

Babyrs was already back in form. “You’re the criminal. What do we tell the Khwarzim? We can’t tell the truth or we’ll be burned for blasphemy.”

Yusuf looked right through Babyrs, “I’m a robber and a thief, but not a fool. I never lie to a man who looks through me.”

As they rode off together Yusuf felt some comfort in the fact that Babyrs had shown his weakness, and that was all he had ever desired of any man.

“…The authorities were warned of this and decided to wipe them out, but they fled. In their huts were found an enormous number of human bones. I have it from a trustworthy source that four hundred skulls were counted.”