by Tim Powers
“Here you go, lad,” said the portly man. “Drink up. Nothing in that silly show is worth tears on such a beautiful Christmas morning.”
“Thank you,” said Jacky, sniffing and wiping her nose on her sleeve after handing the flask back. “I believe you’re right. I don’t suppose anything is ever worth tears. Thank you again.”
She touched her cap, then shoved her hands in her pockets and strode away down the street at a sturdy pace, for it was a long walk back to Pye Street.
CHAPTER 13
“When the great tragedy was ended, and the last groan had died away by the Bab-el-Azab, Mohammed Ali’s Italian physician offered him his congratulations; but the Pasha did not answer, he only asked for drink, and drank a deep draught.”
—G. Ebers
More than seven miles distant across the noon-bright Nile Valley the pyramids stood sharply clear on the horizon, and, seeming to be only a little closer, though just two miles away from the Citadel wall on which the watcher stood, the green-bordered Nile stretched like a polished steel band from north to south. A few wavering pencil strokes of smoke stood up from what he knew was El Roda island, though it was not distinguishable as a separate land mass from this distance, and he could see individual palm trees and minarets and windows of buildings in the old quarter of Cairo on the hither bank. Some of our guests, he thought, the Bahrites, are probably coming through those streets right now. And a splendid parade it no doubt is, too—all the little boys will have stopped work to watch, and the dogs will be barking, and all the mashrebeeyeh lattices of the second-floor harems are sure to be glittering with kohl-darkened eyes peering down at the haughty war lords riding past below. Soon the bejewelled procession will be clear of the old district and will be visible riding this way over the old stone road that transects the mile of desert between old Cairo and the Citadel.
Doctor Romanelli shivered slightly in spite of the heat and turned to the north, squinting at the bristling, tangled maze of whitewashed walls and brightly colored enamelled domes that was the new section of the city, which had grown up like lush riverside vegetation around the highway, called the Mustee, that connected the Citadel with the ancient Harbor of Boolak. The bulk of this afternoon’s guests would be riding even now through the crowded Mustee.
He thought he caught a distant wink of glare, as of the sun reflecting on a lance head or polished helmet. Two hundred years ago, he thought, there was a purpose for the army of ex-slaves called the Mamelukes; but in today’s Egypt they’re an embarrassment that’s strangling the country, imposing a crushing and savagely enforced tax on anyone who seems to have money, and strong enough in force of arms to acknowledge no law but their own tastes. We couldn’t let them retain that kind of power, especially now that Mohammed Ali is in power and the eyes of the world are watching us, to gauge their own actions by what we do. Independence is within our reach again for the first time in thousands of years, and we can’t have it imperilled by a group of local brigands. How fortunate that Ali looks to the Master—through me—as his main advisor!
And if I return to England, he thought as he turned and watched the sweating slaves loading the signal cannon, it will be to disassemble the history of that nation, so that today—a new today—they’ll be nothing, probably a possession of France, which we’ll also impede. All we’ve got to do is rediscover the knowledge that died with the Romany ka—and we will before long, either through the completion of our calculations or, still conceivably, the wringing of some vital clue from that wretched ka we managed to draw of Brendan, Doyle before he got away from us.
That is a very long shot, though, he thought sourly, remembering last night’s interrogation as he walked down the stone steps to the narrow, sun-baked street outside the el-Azab gate.
The ka had been dragged out of its basement cell for the first time in at least a month, and for half an hour hadn’t even seemed to hear the questions the Master was putting to it, but just sat on the balcony chewing the end of its filthy beard and springing with little cries away from, evidently, imaginary insects. Finally it had spoken, though not in reply to any question. “I keep trying to stop them,” it had muttered, “from getting on the bike, you know? But it’s always too late, and they’re on the freeway before I can catch them, and I pull over ‘cause I don’t want to see it… But I hear it… the clank of the fall, and the grinding slide… and the smash of the helmet exploding against the pillar… “
“How did you exit the time stream?” the Master asked, for the fourth time.
“Jacky pulled me out,” the ka replied. “He threw a net over the little men and then pulled me into his canoe… “
“No, the time stream. How did you exit it?”
“It’s all one river, and the mile posts are calendar pages. If your keels be nimble and light, you may get there by candle light. The river is iced-over, you see—weren’t you listening when Darrow explained it?—but there’s a boat, with faces painted on the wheels, that can sail over the ice—the boat can come alive, and kill you… a black boat, blacker than the darkness… “
The Master had fallen into a fit of incoherent rage at this point, and had had to speak through one of the wax ushabti figures in the pen on the bottom of the sphere. “Take it away,” croaked the voice, “and stop the delivery of food to its cell—we don’t need it.”
Yes, a long shot, certainly—but still a possibility; after all, there were a couple of interesting hints of pattern in its ravings.
In any case, Romanelli reflected as he opened a door that quite soon would be securely locked, we may not even need the Anubis Gates. There will be further bold political strokes like the one that will occur this afternoon, and with as strong a leader as Mohammed Ali taking the Master’s council, we might be able to re-establish Egypt even without being able to rewrite history. The question of when to arrange a secret assassination and substitution by a docile ka can be deferred for at least several years.
Before stepping into the hall he glanced up and down the narrow, empty street between the high walls. Quiet right now, he thought.
The Mustee, at an hour past noon, was at its most crowded, with heavily laden camels pressing stolidly through the throng, and the shouts of the veiled women selling oranges rising in jarring cacophony over the song of the rat catcher—on whose broad-brimmed hat six trained examples of his prey, each wearing a little hat of its own, formed a pyramid—and the yells of the fish and milk vendors and the chanted prayers of the beggars. But the mob parted hastily before the relentless hooves of the procession riding down the center of the street at a relaxed but indomitable walk. In hopes of a tip at the end of the ride, a street boy had taken it upon himself to serve as the—in this case unnecessary—sais, or runner-ahead;
“Riglak!” he would warn some Nubian merchant, whose foot had been snatched out of the way even before the boy called, and “Uxrug!” to two ladies from a harem who had already crowded up against a wall and were shrilly and indignantly protesting this usurpation of the street.
But everyone was as eager to see the parade as to get out of its way, and the British elfendis turned their palm-branch chairs around on the sidewalk in front of the Zawiyah Cafe to keep an uneasy eye on the procession as they took somewhat deeper sips of their drinks, for this was a formal procession of the Mameluke Beys in all their finery. The hot sun glinted on the precious stones that studded their sword hilts and pistol butts, and their colorful robes and feathered turbans and helmets made the rest of the street seem drab by comparison; but in spite of the grandeur of the jewelled weapons and the rich cloths and the gorgeously caparisoned Arabian horses, the most striking aspect of the parade was the lean, hawk-nosed brown faces and the narrowed eyes that remained haughtily above the crowd.
Not least impressive of the faces was the helmeted, black-bearded one that belonged to an impostor; and though many of the people who scurried out of the way or peered down from windows knew the cobbler Eshvlis, whose place of business was a niche in the outside
wall of a mosque two blocks away, none of them recognized him in the gold-chased armor of the Mameluke Bey Ameen.
And none of them knew that even in his daily routine of repairing shoes Eshvlis was an impostor—that, before choosing that name and dying his hair and beard black, he had been called Brendan Doyle.
* * *
Over the past few months Doyle had got used to being Eshvlis, but he was far from confident in this role he’d assumed today, and he averted his face whenever he noticed one of his patrons in the crowd. The impersonation that he’d agreed to so cheerfully this morning was beginning to make him nervous—was it, he wondered, a crime to attend the Pasha’s banquet by arriving disguised as one of the invited guests? Probably. If his friend Ameen hadn’t been counting on the success of the deception, Doyle would have spurred the borrowed horse out of the parade, divested himself of the sword, daggers and fine clothes, and sneaked back to his cobbler’s niche to enjoy the show from a comfortable distance.
He glanced at his niche as they rode past it, and, although he had booked passage out of the country on a ship that would weigh anchor tomorrow, he was surprised and angry to see another cobbler perched there in a nest of dangling shoes. Absent one morning, he thought bitterly, and the competition moves in like rats.
Up ahead was the square where he’d first encountered Ameen. Doyle smiled grimly, remembering that hot October morning, which had begun to go wrong when Hassan Bey’s shoe buckle broke off during a meeting with the British governor.
The humiliating misfortune had caused the immediate termination of the interview, and Hassan and his brothers-in-law Ameen and Hathi had left the Citadel and ridden back toward their boat at Boolak, but in this square by the Mustee there had occurred a further disaster: the burly beggar known as Eshvlis, whose large, wood-framed placard proclaimed him a deaf-mute, was a little slow in scrambling to his feet and getting out of the Mamelukes’ way, and a projecting nail on his placard caught in a fold of Hassan’s embroidered robe and tore a wide rent in it, exposing the outraged Mameluke’s thigh.
Hassan had roared a blasphemous curse, reached around and snatched the ivory inlaid hilt of his sword, and in one lightning motion drew the yard of gleaming steel and whirled it in a torso-splitting arc at the beggar.
But quick as a mongoose Doyle had dropped to all fours in the dust, so that though the blade shattered his begging sign, it flashed harmlessly over him, missing the top of his head by several inches—and before the surprised Mameluke could raise the sword again, Doyle sprang up at him, seized the grip of one of the horseman’s daggers and wrenched it free, and with it parried the weaker return stroke of the great sword.
Hathi had moved then, with a sort of indolent swiftness, reining his horse back and lifting the barrel of his sheathed rifle to hip level; and even as Ameen’s eyes widened with the realization of what Hathi was about to do, and he rode forward with a shout, Hathi pulled the trigger.
With a bang that echoed around the square the rifle had recoiled out of the sheath; Hathi’s battle-trained horse hadn’t jumped, but shook its head and flapped its lips in the sudden burst of smoke. Doyle finished a backward somersault face down on the paving stones, and a glistening red hole torn in the back of his robe quickly disappeared as flowing blood soaked the fabric.
“You villains!” Ameen had shouted then. “He was a beggar.” His voice conveyed the point that a beggar was not only no sword-worthy opponent but, in the Moslem view of things, an actual representative of Allah, with the job of demanding the alms every true believer was bound by duty to give.
The street took a jog to the left now, and beyond the shadowed shoulder of; a building Doyle could see, still a mile away, the minarets and sheer stone walls of the Citadel seeming to loom halfway to the sky on the top of the precipitous Mukattam Hill, and though the occasion that brought the Mamelukes to the fortress was nominally social—the appointment of Mohammed Ali’s son as a pashalik—the forbidding aspect of the tall edifice made Doyle glad that he and his companions were so well armed.
Ameen had assured him this morning that the mass arrest he expected, and was secretly fleeing to evade, would not take place at this banquet. “Relax, Eshvlis,” he had told Doyle as he drew the straps tight on the last of his trunks and peered out the window at the baggage-laden camels on the street below, “Ali is not insane. Though he will—and soon, I believe—curtail the unreasonable power of the Mamelukes, he’d never dare try to arrest all four hundred and eighty of the Beys as a lot, and while they’re armed. I think the real purpose of this banquet is to count his foes, make sure they’re all in the city, so that sometime tonight, before dawn, he can drag them drunk and unarmed out of their beds on some charge or other. Not that we don’t deserve exactly such treatment, as you with your bullet scar would be, if you weren’t so polite, the first to aver. But I am off for Syria this afternoon, and you are returning to your Eshvlis identity right after the banquet and leaving Cairo tomorrow morning, and so you and I will escape the net.”
Ameen had made it sound perfectly safe… And Doyle owed him his life, for it had been Ameen who had ordered Doyle’s bleeding body to be picked up and taken to the Moristan of Ka’aloon for medical attention, and two months later got him well started in the cobbling trade by demanding that Hassan pay him a hundred gold pieces for the repair of the broken shoe buckle. The torn robe had never been alluded to, and Hassan probably considered it paid for—by the two holes, entry and exit, in the cobbler’s hide.
Doyle frowned, and for just a moment wondered why none of these events were even hinted at in the Bailey biography of Ashbless. After all, they were just the sort of thing that would make a poet’s biography interesting: a brief career as a beggar, shot through the side by a Mameluke warlord, attending a royal banquet in disguise—and then he smiled, for of course he couldn’t tell Bailey these things, because Doyle was going to read the biography some day. And would you, he asked himself, have gone anywhere near that square if you’d known you’d be shot there that day?
Well, at least I know that Ashbless does leave Egypt on the Fowler, bound for England, tomorrow morning, so even though I never got around to researching Cairo in 1811, there can’t be too many more surprises I’ll neglect to tell Bailey about. I guess I won’t, for example, be recaptured by Romanelli, who has now, I hear, got himself set up as Mohammed Ali’s personal physician. I don’t think he’d recognize me now anyway, with the black dyed hair, the deep tan and all the new furrows and lines in my face that are the legacy of a long convalescence without anesthesia. At least this body’s still got both ears.
At the parade ground in front of the Citadel the ranks of mainland Mamelukes were joined by the Bahrite Beys, and for fifteen hot minutes—during which Eshvlis sweated into the appallingly expensive borrowed robe and let Ameen’s horse follow Hathi’s, who rode just ahead of him—all but one of the four hundred and eighty Mameluke Beys, the tribe of one-time slaves that had risen to absolute control of the country, and had in recent years fallen only a little from that zenith, paraded in colorful, barbaric splendor under the empty blue sky of Egypt.
Ameen’s agile and powerful mare, Melboos, pranced proudly along, tossing her head sometimes, and in general making her rider seem to be what he was not, a competent horseman. She was a fine animal, and had been Ameen’s proudest possession, but the impersonation had demanded that he leave her behind.
It suddenly occurred to Doyle that he’d miss Ameen, who’d been the only one in Cairo who knew Eshvlis was not really a deaf-mute. Schooled in Vienna, the young Bey had learned other goals and perspectives than the traditional war and glory ones of the Mamelukes, and through many long afternoons Ameen had stood beside the cobbler’s niche and talked to him in English about history and politics and religion—though they’d always been careful to cease speaking if a customer crowded close enough to hear their low-pitched conversation, for Ameen had heard that the Pasha was offering a reward for any information about a big, English-speaking fugitive.
Now several ranks of the Pasha’s Albanian mercenaries rode up, bristling with swords and maces and pistols, and rifles taller than themselves, and looking, to Eshvlis at least, ridiculous in their pleated white skirts and extra-tall turbans.
The Albanians rode down a set of steps into a narrow street leading up the steep slope to the Citadel, and the ranks of the Mamelukes followed them into it as the Bab-el-Azab gate at the far end of the sunken street slowly swung open.
In spite of the fact that they were now out of sight of the spectators, the Mamelukes maintained their stately pace, though the Albanians galloped rowdily ahead toward the open gate.
Doyle stared curiously around at the twenty-foot-deep ascending trench through which they were marching; it was certainly part of the Citadel’s fortifications, for there were only a few stout doors in the solid stone walls on either side, and the windows, though many, were vertical slits just wide enough to poke a gun barrel through.
Now fifty yards ahead, the galloping Albanian mercenaries had reached the Bab-el-Azab gate… and Doyle’s eyes widened in surprise to see, when the last of them was inside the Citadel, the gate begin to close. He hunched around in the saddle to look behind, and saw that the distant entrance to the walled street was blocked by more of the mercenaries. Even as he watched, the front row of them dropped to their knees and every one of them raised a long rifle and sighted along the barrel.
As he took a breath to yell an alarm a cannon boomed and spurted a stain of gray smoke into the blue sky, and an instant later the street erupted with deafening and continuous gunfire from in front and behind and from every slit window, and the air chirped and twanged with the whipping flight of dozens of bullets every second, and dust and stone chips burst from the walls as churning smoke burned in eyes and throats and obscured any view of the foe.