by Donald Tyson
“You look like a man with a future.”
I turned from the juggler, searching for the source of these words uttered in Greek. A grizzled man of middle years, in a dirty linen tunic slit down the front in the Egyptian fashion, who stood hunched under a back deformed by some accident of fate, or perhaps a misfortune of birth, peered up at me from beneath his turban with sharp brown eyes and an ingratiating smile. One shoulder was higher than the other, and I saw that one bare leg twisted, so that he limped when he moved.
The blue of his turban suggested that his faith was Christian, as laid down in the Covenant of Umar, in which it was required that Christians wear blue turbans and Jews yellow turbans, so that they might be more easily identified by members of the true faith, but the color laws were frequently violated, so it was no sure test. I gazed down at him without interest, and was about to walk away when he spoke again.
“Yes, you look like a young man with a future, but what use is a future unless it can be known in advance?”
“All futures are unknown, both mine and yours,” I muttered in my own tongue, thinking to discourage his impertinence by revealing that I was Muslim.
With caution I glanced around the square, and wondered if he had accomplices who prepared to rob me while he distracted my attention, but I saw only a slender child clothed in a long black dress, who huddled behind the man with head bowed, so that I could not easily see her face within the shadow of the black wrap that swathed her hair and girdled her waist. By her stature and posture I judged her to be a girl of some fourteen years. She was the first girl approaching womanhood that I had seen in this green land without a veil. Perhaps that explained her shyness.
“Nothing is concealed from a master in the arts of magic,” he whispered in Arabic, leaning close, so that I bent away from his stench.
There was wine on his breath, and I saw redness at the corners of his eyes. Even so, he did not appear drunk, but regarded me with a shrewd calculation, as though gauging the effect of every word. I knew I should simply turn and walk away, but some disordered humor made me remain. His knowledge of Arabic surprised me. It was the language used by the rulers of Egypt since the victory of the Prophet more than forty years earlier, but I had not expected to hear it spoken in the marketplace. The mention of magic on the tongue of so earthy a creature amused me. I wondered what his reaction would be if he saw my true face or felt the touch of the djinn passing through his body.
I pretended to look around the square.
“Where is the master of magic?” I asked. “Has one passed us while you were speaking?”
He laughed with his scarred lips, but his eyes glittered. I saw that my poor jest angered him, and resisted the urge to thrust him onto his buttocks on the dusty stones.
“He stands before you.”
“You, a magician?”
“Not only a magician, but a seer. There is no man of greater skill in the arts of divination. You say your future is unknown, but to me it is an open book, waiting to be read.”
I regarded him with a mild expression.
“If you are so great a seer, perhaps you can tell me how much the knowledge of my future will cost me.”
He smiled broadly with his thin mouth, for these were the very words he had hoped to hear.
“A trifle, noble lord, a pittance, a nothing. No more than a silver coin, for the unveiling of the world to come.”
Some caprice caused me to open my new leather purse and extract a dirham of the smallest of the three sizes. His eyes watched every motion of my hands, and I could see him estimate the weight of silver and gold coins that lay in the bottom of the purse by the sounds they made clinking together. I passed the coin to him and watched it disappear, indeed as if by magic.
“A piece of silver is little enough for a knowledge of the future. Show me your arts, master sorcerer.”
He barked a harsh word in Coptic while continuing to smile with his mouth, and the girl emerged from behind him. I expected her expression to be nervous when she raised her head, but there was boldness in her wide-set eyes, which were the most startling bleached gray I had ever seen, and of uncommon largeness. They were almost white, so pale was their color. She looked at me without a tremor, and her cool gaze seemed to pierce into me.
Without a word, she jerked back the loose sleeve of her black gown and extended her right hand. The palm was filthy, as though she had been cleaning oil lamps and had not washed herself. I noticed that her fingernails were trimmed to points, instead of rounded in the usual way, and wondered if it was a style of the women of this strange wet land.
The bent man took from his clothing a small flask of clouded glass and uncorked it, then poured some of its contents into the girl’s palm, where it formed a midnight pool of shining liquid. By its smell, I guessed it to be an oil mixed with lamp black to make a kind of ink. The girl held her hand with care, the fingers slightly cupped, as though the jet pool were precious. She bent her head over her palm, and a wisp of her black hair escaped from her wrap and fell across her thin cheek.
“I thought you were the magician, not your daughter,” I said to the cripple.
He shrugged off my words the way a dog shakes water from its coat.
“She is only my instrument. It is I who call the spirits of the ink. It is I who compel them to reveal their secrets.”
He made several passes with his forefinger over the girl’s palm and began to chant in Coptic. It was a language unknown to me, so the words were meaningless. After a while, he spoke to her in Greek, for the benefit of my understanding.
“What do you see?”
She squinted into the ink and licked her lips.
“Nothing, I see nothing,” she said in Greek.
With a curse, the man repeated his passes and incantations, his voice more demanding in its tone. For several minutes we stood in silence and waited. The body of the girl became motionless, and her breaths deepened.
“I see the desert,” she said without expression. She spoke as though in a trance.
The man glanced up at me from the corner of his eye and nodded.
“What else?”
“A whirlwind comes sweeping across the sand. Now it stops and dies, leaving a man in its place, a tall man dressed in black, with a black hood pulled over his head.”
My heart quickened. Could it be that this fool or his daughter possessed power? I peered into the ink but saw only reflections.
“What does the man do?” her father demanded with impatience.
“He stands. He lifts his head as though smelling the air. Now he walks forward, head bent to the ground, as though searching for something at his feet.”
“Leave this dark man and look elsewhere,” her father hissed into her ear. “Show our noble lord something of value.”
She did not respond, and I saw that she had not heard him. All her attention was in the ink.
“He looks up, as though he has seen something before him. He walks forward with long strides, coming closer. He has seen me, but I cannot see his face. It is in shadow. He walks so swiftly, his feet fly across the sands.”
Her voice became strained with emotion.
“The dark man speaks, and his voice rolls like thunder. I cannot understand his words, but he chants in some strange language. Nf’tang li gok, Yog-Sothoth ngh’ah . . .”
I struck her hand aside and sent the pool of ink flying off her palm. The effect was as though I had hit her on the cheek. She gave a faint scream and fell unconscious to the dusty stones of the square.
The conjuror knelt and shook her by her thin shoulders.
“Martala, wake up! Martala!”
She groaned and shuddered so that her entire body shook from head to toe. Her eyelids fluttered.
He glared at me with malice.
“You fool, yo
u might have killed her.”
“That would be tragic,” I said without emotion. “How would you earn your living?”
I turned and left them on the ground, thinking that I should find a place to sleep for the night. I intended to spend the rest of the day in Bubastis, and the next morning to set out for Memphis, which lay some length of distance up the Nile, just above the Delta. From my readings, I had learned that Memphis was a city of mysteries. I hoped to learn something of value in magic while in Egypt, and Memphis seemed like the best place to begin. To the girl and her father, if indeed he was her father, for there was no likeness between them, I gave no further thought. She was possessed of the gift of seership, of that there was no doubt, but I was certain that neither of them had skill in the arts of necromancy that I sought to acquire. The divination by ink was a juggler’s trick, nothing more.
The fat owner of the inn where I stopped to seek a bed for the night was happy to rent me his best room, an airy space on the second level that had a window opening over a walled garden.
“It is your fortune that you came at the end of summer, when the town is deserted. In spring you could not have found a room for any money,” he told me in Greek.
“What happens in the spring?” I asked, walking around the bed and eyeing the window. A trellis stood below it, covered in orange flowers that left a delightful scent on the breeze that blew into the room through the carven wooden shutters.
He threw up his fat hands and rolled his eyes.
“The rites of Bast take place. This is her birthplace. Men and women come from all over Egypt, and even as far away as Rome and Athens, to celebrate the birth of the goddess.”
My gaze was distracted by his hands, which had the same pointed nails I had noticed on the hand of the girl in the marketplace.
“Bast?”
“The goddess of cats.” He looked at me with an expression of shock. “Have you never heard of Bast? Where do you come from?”
“Ah, the goddess of cats. Thank you for refreshing my memory.”
“Every spring for two weeks her worshippers celebrate by dancing in the streets, feasting, singing, making love.” He winked at me. “Many a young Greek has come to Bubastis during the spring rites, but not to celebrate the goddess.”
“Forgive me, but wasn’t Egypt a Christian land before it fell under the protection of the caliphate?”
He shrugged, and used his dirty fingernail to flick a fly from the lip of a pitcher that sat on a table, half filled with water.
“We are Christians, but we are also Egyptians. My people have celebrated the rites of Bast for thousands of years.”
“If I am not being impertinent,” I murmured, pointing to his hand.
He glanced at it and looked at me.
“Your fingernails. Why do you cut them to points?”
With a laugh, he wiggled his fingers and put his hand behind his back, as though in slight embarrassment.
“It is nothing. A fashion of this place. You will see it on others. It has no meaning.”
Since he did not wish to explain, I let the question pass into silence. A boy entered to announce that the hot water I had requested upon renting the room was ready. I descended to the kitchen, where a large copper trough with rounded ends had been prepared for me in a back chamber that offered privacy. Through the open doorway I saw that it was half filled. The sullen-faced scullery drudge took from the stone hearth of the enormous kitchen fireplace a copper kettle, using a scorched cloth to protect her hands from its coiled handle, and emptied its boiling contents into the trough, holding the kettle away from her body in both hands with her legs spread wide until she poured off some of its weight. Before leaving me alone in the chamber, she dripped scented oil into the water from a glass vial.
At the palace in Sana’a I had grown accustomed to frequent hot baths. Not until my exile had I recognized the greatness of this luxury. I stripped and slid my naked body into the tub with a sigh of pure delight. As steam from the warm water rose around me, I breathed its dampness as though it were fine perfume. The feel of the rough linen wash cloth against my skin was like a caress. I soaked it in hot water and covered my face, leaving my mouth exposed, then slid down into the bath until the water came up to my chin. Only my knees stuck out above the surface of the water; the copper trough was not large enough to contain them.
A scuff behind me on the clay floor aroused me from my state of bliss. I had noticed a rough wooden door in the outer wall of the windowless little room, but had thought nothing of it. Without moving, I tried to think where I had put my thawb. My dagger lay beneath it. I remembered folding it across a workbench that stood against the rear wall of the room, no more than two paces from the back door. Whoever had entered stood between me and the table. I considered crying out with all the strength of my voice the word murder in both Arabic and Greek, but knew that I would be dead before help arrived. Instead, I grasped the sides of the trough and with one motion pulled myself to my feet and turned.
The girl from the market stood in front of the open door. Her hands were empty, I noted with relief. No one moved in the deserted yard beyond the doorway.
Her gaze dropped from my eyes to my groin. She stared at it, and I hoped the illusion she was seeing was as attractive as my own body had been before its mutilation. She met my eyes. Her lower lip bore a cut on its corner and her cheek had acquired an ugly purple bruise.
“You are in danger,” she said in Greek. “I came to warn you. Leave Bubastis or you will be killed.”
Stepping from the trough, I took down the dry linen towel that had been left for my use on a wall hook and wiped my body. My eyes never left her.
“Shut the door.”
She closed the wooden panel and stood watching me with her hands clasped in front of her waist, hidden within her sleeves.
“Who would wish to kill me? I am a stranger in Egypt. No one even knows me.”
“You have gold and silver. That is reason enough.”
“Your father?”
She made a sound of disgust.
“He is not my father. He is a pig.”
Picking up my thawb, I dressed. When I tied Gor’s skull around my waist, I felt more comfortable. The weight of my dagger on its baldric was also reassuring.
“Whatever the man’s connection with you, I do not fear him,” I said as I pulled on my boots and laced them against the edge of the trough.
“He will not come alone.”
“How does he know where I am staying?”
“He had me follow you.”
I considered her words. Bubastis held no great interest for me, but I had not expected to be forced to leave the same day I arrived.
“Why are you warning me?”
“You must take me with you. I cannot stay here any longer. If I do Farri will kill me.”
“Farri? That’s his name?”
“Farri al-Asadi.”
She glanced with unease at the door behind her, as though speaking his name might invoke him.
“He is watching the front of the inn. When it is dark and he thinks you are asleep, he plans to break in with two of his hired men and strangle you, then take everything you own.”
“The innkeeper is not part of this plot?”
She shook her head.
“He is an honest man.”
I considered her words. If I left the inn, I would be followed, and the robbers might seize the opportunity to kill me in some empty alley or shadowed doorway. If I remained, I would be killed in my room. At least there seemed no danger until the night, after the inn retired to sleep. I pointed to my lip and cheek, and raised my eyebrows. She touched her cheek with her fingertips, wincing.
“He wanted me to help him. I refused.”
“Did he see you come here?”
She shook her head, her pale eyes wide.
“The garden in back has no gate, and the wall is very high. I climbed the wall. Farri would not expect anyone to come that way.”
I did not trust her, but could see no purpose to her words if they were meant to deceive. In any case, it was safer for her to remain with me than to let her rejoin her companions and tell what she had seen.
“Go back into the garden. Hide out of sight from the inn. There is a wooden trellis under my window. I will open the shutters. When you see them open, and no one watches, climb to my room.”
She nodded, gratitude softening her expression. I watched her pass out the door and close it softly behind her.
Chapter 16
While passing through the kitchen, I bought from the innkeeper’s wife a loaf of bread, cheese, and a bottle of wine, and carried them up to my room on a wooden platter. Setting it on the table beside the door, I crossed to the window and cast wide its crudely carved wooden screens. The garden below appeared empty. Flowers grew in abundance, but hung over the paths, indicating that the tending of the plants had been neglected of late. Perhaps the girl had managed to enter without being seen, as she claimed. I tapped three times on the frame of the shutter with my knuckle. She extended her head around the edge of a wooden shed near the rear of the garden, and with a furtive glance toward the back door, ran across the grass and climbed the trellis beneath the window.
In spite of her long black dress, she had the nimbleness of a monkey and made no sound. Its hem rode up her legs as she climbed. I saw that she wore kuff boots of thin, soft leather that was scarcely thicker than a stocking bound just below her knees, and over them more substantial shoes that did not cover her slender ankles. Between the tasseled tops of the boots and the hiked hem of her white cotton chemise, I glimpsed the ivory skin of her thigh.